After 2.5 years with the same design, I’m looking to do an upgrade to WUWT to give it more modern features. I’ve got some professional help involved to do this. It will be a complete rework from the ground up with a new theme
I’ll be staying with wordpress.com as a host, since it solves all my bandwidth and DDoS attack issue with ease. That means I won’t be able to do wordpress plugins, such as a comment edit/preview feature that everyone asks about. I wish I could, but the security outweighs the convenience.
One thing I do plan is a way to keep the most viewed/discussed stories available on top longer. Some days they scroll off too fast when there’s a lot of news.
That said, I’m open to suggestions. Feel free to drop suggestions in comments.
Tell me what you want to keep, tell me what you want changed or improved. Brainstorm ideas. After all, its a community blog, so I value the input.
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Regarding the side-bar:
The side-bar eats up valuable real estate on a fixed-width format, especially if you adopt my suggestion of two columns of articles on the front page. You can still provide the side-bar on article pages, etc.
Otherwise:
Too many different things in the side-bar. De-cruddification will help people to locate what they want and make your adverts stand out more. 😉
The postings calendar of postings is useless, IMNSHO.
You can (vertically) compress the archives section by seleting a pull-down list option or using a click-through or pull-down selector for years 2006-2012 and months Jan-Dec.
Tag cloud can live in the footer.
Paste your bloggies, etc. in the banner area. (Tallbloke manages this for RSS, etc)
Provide a page of tools. (similar to Tips, etc.)
Anthony,
Agree with the comment that changes should be gradual not significant in one shot.
I don’t know if it is even practical but possibly an option for the author to provide a final summary of the initial post along with a brief analysis of significant comments incorporating significant contributions and rebutting erroneous claims. One of the problems I have on conplex subjects which I have limited knowledge is to decide which comments to “believe” and which to reject and I would welcome the author’s summary (Optional).
Keep up the outstanding contribution to science, I often send your stuff to others unlesss the material is too technical/complex for them to wade through. You are helping to get the message out!!
Threaded comments (nesting replies:
Overall a fair idea but with limits to say a level of sbout 3. Otherwise they become unreadable due to indents.
“Titles” for comments would be nice to have on occasion.
Look for an “engine” that allows readers to “collapse” the threads with the possibility of remembering via user cookies which ones were collapsed – and highlighting the collapsed ones with newer replies. (CA Assistant doesn’t assist in that respect.)
For ipads users, a newest to oldest on comments option would be helpful, scrolling a long post of commments is very cumbersome. Or, pages of say,20 posts each. Other than that,a summary page of the issues with the best links provided that i can direct people to. To the ones i direct here, some get lost In the recent posts not finding the bigger picture they are looking for. Overall simple and clean is what I like the best.
There’s nothing wrong with the look of the site. Why are you messing with it? You have the all important characters per line dead right (Between 66 the Bringhurst optimum, and 90). You generally stay away from flashy plug-ins. It’s great as is.
You are suffering from Politicians Logic (In the words of the Great Sir Humphrey Appleby):
“Something must be done. This is something. Therefore we must do it.”
@joanna;
CA Assistant (using GreaseMonkey) provides all that and more on WP sites.
@Gunga Din;
Lazarus add-on saves your comments in real time, and saves for as long as you specify. Searchable, with one-klik jump to original URL available.
And “Contol” should be “Control”. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/02/wuwt-web-retooling-comments-welcome/#comment-1070038
😉
I often come here and rarely have anything of value to add. But I read. On the other hand sometimes I read and still, the article is over my head.
I would love an associated wiki that let some subset of users that you approve of detail the various posts, enumerate / link sources of climate data, provide details of how modeling works, post links to software analysis tools, list and organize the various arguments pro and con regarding AGW, list the important papers, outline the timeline of climate change, and all that stuff.
Anthony,
An after thought to my comment above re final summary.
It would seem to me that each of these summaries could be a chapter in one or more published books that would broaden the exposure to a greater audience for a long time period down the road.
There are a lot of books or other technical publications at least in the engineering community that are based on a series of papers/documents.
Lots of effort, yes!! But if completed as “you go” it would be a valuable resource that might gain penetration beyond the blog community
Hear, hear! I get quite a bit of pleasure from the banter (including vigorous disagreements, which I welcome to my own posts) in this present format. The up/down option irks me on other sites, and it is a lazy way to register support or disagreement.
You’ve greatly improved this site since I first started to visit, Anthony, but I understand your desire to freshen things up. Encouraging banter as we do is very healthy for the community and generates some really great ideas, I hope we can keep doing this!
Best, Charles the DrPH
p.s. I miss REP!
Typically, “upgrade” means less user friendly and “modern” means slower. Microsoft is well known for this. Is Vista really better than XP? Benchmarks show it is a lot slower. Many features no longer work.
For one of your previous “upgrades” to WUWT, I had to change systems just to post comments. Other wordpress.com sites still work fine on my old system, but this one requires a new system. Whatever you do, please test it on older operating systems and browsers.
Unless a change truly adds improved functionality, it is probably a bad idea.
BTW, I agree with sdsparky, reading comments on an ipad is very painful. That would be worth fixing.
I appreciate the way people insert comics and photos and videos and would do so myself but I don’t know how. Perhaps a Help Page link to assist us non-coding types would allow us to enhance our submissions. It needs to be accessible right next to this window – HTML help. *Click*
If it ain’t broke, why fix it?
Anthony; it’s not broken… in fact WUWT? leads.
…and note there is a Grease Monkey app that automatically provides full formatting and preview options for WUWT? every time it is opened via Firefox.
For those of us who live in a different part of the planet and hence time zone than the bulk of your readers, by the time we get to make a comment or ask a question of someone, several new topics have arrived and the person(s) we would like to answer have moved on to other topics and perhaps never get to see our hopefully pertinent input.
And so a way to reply to individual comments and perhaps also to bring those replies to that persons notice, as per some other blogs, ie. Judith Curry. would be appreciated.
Though it seems that those methods based on nesting only go about three deep, perhaps there is another way to achieve this.
Anthony, I really like the clean, clear layout of the site as it is so be careful not to lose that. I also agree with the very first comment – I sometimes get confused when posts are held at the top and occasionally miss new posts, so keeping the popular posts separate from the chronological order posts would be good.
Whatever you do though, good luck and keep up the good work.
Maybe allow users to have icons alongside their names–unless it would slow things down.
Recently, WordPress has started inserting a panel at the bottom of the page when viewed on a mobile whenever you scroll down from the head of the page. The panel seems to have no purpose, other than listing the name of the site, and jumping to the top of the page when it is clicked. It takes up an inordinate proportion of the page for this trivial function, and makes the mobile version of WordPress almost worthless in view view.
Is there anything that can be done to remove this utterly pointless annoyance?
Thanks.
PS. Other WP sites have the same issue – since it only occurs using phone, I’m amazed that it hasn’t already caused enough complaints to make WP remove it, but no luck so far ;(
Anthony, as you said in your intro, security is a high priority – and especially so in view of recent events and moves by “authorities” to initiate internet restrictions. WUWT is just right as it is.
I agree with Tallbloke and subsequent commenters about like/dislike buttons.
More opportunities to vote on something would be nice.
Being able to vote (?) on Arctic ice extent was fun, the second time round, it was still fun, but it also had the side benefit of making me think about it more before I gave my answer.
An opportunity to occasionally vote on something would be nice, harmless fun and interesting. It need not be a regular thing, if it were a weekly thing or happened too often then that would perhaps spoil it.
May I suggest two votes to put to your readership that I would like to be able to participate in;
(1). A vote on NSIDC ice max, not just ice min as at present, that way we get to vote and think about that twice a year, that’s surely not too often.
(2). A vote on who we think should run the IPCC, I suspect the current incumbent would not fair too well in the outcome. To my mind there is one outstanding candidate, I vote for Judith Curry.
Whilst many would no doubt vote for the indomitable Anthony Watts, I feel his contribution to society is better served by continuing with WUWT.
I concur with tallbloke: absolutely no agree/disagree buttons!
No nesting of replies, it makes it very difficult to follow a debate when one opts for e-mail alerts. Combined with a column lay-out, the results can be utterly vile, with ‘nests’ being reduced to one single letter …
A number for comments makes it easier to reply, and a ‘read more’ button, collapsing comments to about five or six lines is an excellent idea.
As so many other have said: keep the white background, keep the font, and don’t change too much all at once!
Thanks, as always, for the valuable work of you and the mods.
Can you please fix the first image on the right column under the heading Live Weather Roll. It is frozen on the same page from a year ago. The link is:
http://imagery.weatherframe.com/imagery/jamesbradley/earthchron_utc_800x600.jpg
If you go to the home page of that site it doesn’t seem to update either.
How about threaded comments (as slashdot has), i.e. a second reply to someone else’s original reply are placed directly under the original reply, indented. Easier to follow discussions than having to scroll to find the next reaction.
The site is already excellent, clear and easy to use.
However it is often easier to find older posts and the excellent comments and debates by using Google rather than the WUWT search facility. There is so much tremendous information in past posts and comments that it would be a plus if there was a simpler way of accessing this.
I often find myself wondering whether a piece of text is a quote or part of the new writing. Climate Audit could serve as a template for how to clearly mark a quote!
Totally agree with Tallbloke and others about like/dislike buttons – please don’t have them