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.
Rather than up/down buttons, I prefer the SBNation “recommend/flag” buttons on the comment threads. The “flag” button is just used to alert the moderators of something bad, and the “rec” is something readers use when they think a comment should be read by everyone. A post gets 5 recs, and it is highlighted.
I would like typographical or grammatical errors to result in instant banning of the commenter, rather than have to point out the errors and shame the user into leaving.
Been entertaining kids and grandkids all week, including today at the beach, so apologies for not reading all the comments. But. . .
Please, NO! I hate comments pages with truncated text that needs clicking to see the rest. It’s an absolute abomination.
I guess I appreciate (but without understanding) your reasons for no Preview function, but how about a real Reply box with Quote, Emphasis (italics), Strong (bold), type size, etc. commands? That would make life infinitely easier than typing HTML commands in angle brackets.
And please keep the very clean and readable font, leading, main column.
Better searching would help. I also agree with making changes incrementally, rather than in one fell swoop. Letting design ‘professionals’ work on your web page can be a mixed blessing. Some have brilliant ideas and sensibility; others see ‘design’ as overriding content and reader interface values as secondary. Above all, it must be easy and friendly to read, as for the most part, it has been.
My $2 worth (about what it costs to get 2 pennies worth of candy these days).
/Mr Lynn
AnonyMoose says:
September 2, 2012 at 6:18 pm
That’s one reason I created “Ric Werme’s Guide to WUWT (updated daily)”. It’s up there on the right side nav column. http://home.comcast.net/~ewerme/wuwt/index.html Heads up – when Anthony changes the format, the “updated daily” part will be a lie until I can adapt.
Click the icon and you get a page with the last 14 days of posts listed by headline (I’m not fond of uninformative headlines…). And links to Tables of Content for each month and for each category. I include the number of comments so you can see the ones with the most responses, and the ones still active (generally with people bickering over something).
Umm, are you sure you want “an Archive index… a page which begins a reverse chron index of all posts?” At one line per post, it’s 7600+ lines. A bit long to display on a smart phone.
Ric,
Just want to say, you do a really excellent job on the Guide. It helps immensely.
I like it like it is!
If you do anything, I’m confident that you will have given it a lot of thought. And the best part is that should you choose to make any changes, there is no sense of urgency as is pushed by “post-normal science”. Change for the sake of change?
***No “thumbs button” please.***
A temporary/personal marker to quickly jump back to a post being responded to may be nice.
“Preview” function would be nice.
But I still like it just the way it is!
Ric,
Your “Ric Werme’s Guide to WUWT” is a feature I use often. Don’t change anything.
Adoption of a feature of the blog Climate Etc. would be welcome. If one responds to a comment then this response appears as indented text below the referenced comment.
The comment system could best be changed to allow images. It seems to presently permit youtube videos but not simpler images. While this is not a forum exactly, almost all forums do so, and, with the mods already previewing comments before appearance anyway, there is zero risk of someone getting anything too inappropriate posted.
For example, on the recent sea ice topics, a combination of seeing both http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ArcticIce/Images/arctic_temp_trends_rt.gif and http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadisst/charts/NHEM_extanom.png together is worth 10000 words.
(EDIT: Actually, just while writing this, I see the latter is so illustrative that they already realized they needed to delete it, with that address no longer working; however, I saved it to webcitation 3 days ago so the following functions as a verifiable substitute link: http://www.webcitation.org/6AKKakUIo ).
But just text links to graphs are utterly crippling, when only 1% to several percent of viewers will click on a link, so I didn’t bother posting or arguing with the warmists in the recent sea ice threads when they could so readily just ignore such, when I’d be using time extremely inefficiently at not a tenth of normal effectiveness.
A total retooling of something incredibly successful… seems a bit much. Modern these days seems to lead back to a hunt for practicality & functionality in the end. Truth be told… its an incredible site & I trust its creator, just hope it keeps its “In your eye” simplicity. The only improvement would be the retrievable archive – not only to relieve Ric a bit but because it has become such an incredible chronlogy. I mean take this “tome”, drop it in the middle of the IPCC and watch an immediate, horrid case of the “runs” accompanied by an equally tenacious case of the “itches”. I love this site… so I guess the running ticker in my head saying “do no harm” is natural.
Select a WordPress option that flags or highlights those comments that are NEW since the veiwer’s last visit to the thread. Some sites already have this feature, though usually they’re ones with nested comments, where this is a virtual necessity. On WUWT, where the comments are chronological, something simpler could be provided, such as a dividing line with a label one could search for. This would cut down on time wasted trying to “find one’s place.”
Thanks to commenters above who mentioned that auto formatting including preview of comments is available through GreaseMonkey on Firefox. I have installed GM, but don’t know what to do next to install the auto-formatting. Can anyone help? Thanks in advance.
Oh, and Anthony I strongly agree with those who urge you to keep the font and white background. There are quite a few sites that I can only bear to read in short bursts because of the poor readability for those with less than perfect eyesight.
Please, no nesting – it’s a nightmare in long threads. You have to go through hundreds of comments each time you revisit to follow the discussion. But numbering of posts is an excellent feature, which makes a lot of reposting unnecessary for commenters, and helps readers to find what they are referring to quickly.
Appreciate the opportunity to provide input, and agree with those who say, if it ain’t broke etc.
PS: Better than a dividing line would be for the software to take the returning visitor to the comment after the last one in the thread during his prior visit.
I agree with Johanna: no nesting! And keep the black on white text. And numbering comments would be very useful.
Ditto too to rogerknights: The comments threads are so long that it’s hard to find your place when you return. Is an auto-return possible?
/Mr Lynn
It’s currently too cluttered, losing about 25% or so of viewing space with ALOT of items on the right margin. I don’t find the tabs at top useful, ever; but I’m not a scientist, just a dude. Drop-down tabs for “links”, “references/resources”, “awards/accolades”, “maps/charts/graphs”, “solar” “lunar” “ocean”, etc. would clear up alot.
As much as I like the 1-3 paragraph preview for each article, it isn’t necessary, and should be condensed to a 1 sentence description or nothing. That would allow spacing for a most likely double-column design for your normal blog-roll and the preference-roll. I’m not sure if this site would still need to be scroll-for-more or if you are able to change it to pages, whereby “older posts” or “previous day(s)” may be clicked to load those.
Just basic organization really. I think it should be cleaner and condensed. I personally would like an “events” drop-down, whereby you have “future” and “past”. Those would not be near-term only, such as eclipses, alignments, or maybe meteor showers, mentioning when/where so people may make arrangements if travel is required or simply to know. It can include conferences/seminars for all “sides” and from whatever organization(s) or person(s). It may also inform us about the past with whatever events are worthy/relevent to mention. I think you get the drift – things that will happen or has happened. I don’t expect full-blown knowledge repository, just what people pass along or you deem is important enough. Probably a page that Just The Facts could fill out with some (I SAY AGAIN, SOME) of his/her links.
good luck
Mel Byrd says:
September 3, 2012 at 9:42 pm
The only thing I’ve had to do in the last year or two is deal with weird characters in titles. And that’s because I haven’t figured out how to get unicode text into my database.
Beyond that, crontab (Unix thing) runs the script every day at 0500 ET.
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Smokey says:
September 3, 2012 at 8:05 pm
> Just want to say, you do a really excellent job on the Guide. It helps immensely.
eyesonu says:
September 3, 2012 at 8:40 pm
> Your “Ric Werme’s Guide to WUWT” is a feature I use often. Don’t change anything.
Thanks. FWIW, it turns out that my file system development career doesn’t translate into creating complex web pages well. Doing anything but “KISS” (Keep It Simple, Stupid) will take more learning time than I have. 🙂
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While I’m at it, given we’re in September and it’s time for the Red Sox to swoon (okay, they got an early start this year), people might enjoy my baseball “Runnings” graphical look at baseball standings at http://wermenh.com/runnings_2012.html . How about that impressive Yankees lead in July? Wouldn’t it be neat if the Washington Nationals beat the Yankees in the World Series?
Ric Werme says:
September 4, 2012 at 10:00 am
If you need more than ASCII & ed(1), it probably doesn’t need doing. 😉
Keep It Simple For Success
Beware of so-called “professional” web site people, some of them are two-year-olds with hammers.
Beware of WordPress “themes” – some of them do things like turn the background black in certain browsers or viewed offline.
Beware of WordPress’ lack of quality, another reason to KISS.
I like it the way it is; you did a great job.
Content suggestion, if you allow me: Please don’t make it more popular/populist. Please put a little more science and a lot less politics, gossips as well as bickering about the usual activists (Gore, Mann, alarmist bloggers, etc.). Most of the time, I feel they’re not worth the publicity you give them.
Maya Angeliu says:
September 3, 2012 at 2:28 pm
I would like typographical or grammatical errors to result in instant banning of the commenter, rather than have to point out the errors and shame the user into leaving.
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Well, that’d be one way to shut down the site ……
REPLY: Another way would be to ban falsely used names, like Maya Angeliu. – Anthony
I would recommend following Michelle Malkin’s layout style, with the main/most important story of the day as the initially loaded content, and link to the rest in chronological order on the right. http://www.michellemalkin.com
Add the following line under “Leave a Reply”:
“Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.”
1) At the top of the page, this “headline” section needs a little bit better prompt:
”
← Quote of the week – I guess we’re just beyond evil now
Sea Ice Page Upgrades, Observations and Questions →”
The arrows are useful, but the “direction” of the arrows (earlier or later posts with respect to time) is unclear.
Please, below each arrow, add a prompt “Earlier Posts” under the left arrow, and “Later Posts” under the right arrow.
2) For each reply, add a permanent “sequence number” so later readers can tell where the question or response is in the looooong litany of responses and comments above the “Reply” text entry screen.. If a comment is deleted, or moved to the spam folder, or edited by the mods, no sequence numbers need to be changed. Just leave them as-written.
Best? Allow an automatic link (in the “Reply” box, or below it, or within the “header” (which now has a user_id and time date stamp) for the reader to create a reply linked to the comment immediately. (See http://www.freerepublic.com, where I’ve used this feature more than 130,000 times the past 12 years) for format and uses of this feature.)
Stark Dickflüssig says:
September 4, 2012 at 10:33 am
> If you need more than ASCII & ed(1), it probably doesn’t need doing. 😉
My fingers still know TECO, the direct predecessor to Emacs. http://almy.us/teco.html And when I press ESCape my brain still thinks altmode.
– Ric$$ (Backup one letter and insert “c”)
It would be nice if you used a plugin that makes use of the fantastic MobileESP project. This project has cataloged all mobile devices, including tablets, and identifies them so your site can load the best theme for any given device. I haven’t looked at WP plugins that might use this, but I know that your current mobile version is not very friendly to older devices. On my BlackBerry 9000, it takes eons to load the page, and the (I’m assuming) ajax portion that continually loads older posts while the user scrolls down is not present on my older device, so I just get to the bottom and I’m done. Also, on newer devices, I agree with the above poster who stated that the bar along the bottom seems unnecessary and takes up scarce screen space.
I remember way back from nearly the very beginning, your blog has always been one of the most mobile-friendly, and I think an addition of something like MobileESP would keep it on top.
Thanks for all your hard work!