Do y’all like this design better?

Some of y’all were complaining about the formatting on comments on the new blog design — that the comments were so narrow, and got narrower as you replied.

Being the sensitive guy that I am, I gently urged y’all to suck it up and get used to it for now, because there were many things about the new design that I liked — and which some of y’all liked, too — and I was not inclined to start over from scratch without giving this more of a chance.

But Chip Oglesby, who hosts my site now, saw the complaints and offered to address them. So he came up with a new theme. It’s in place now. I’m still tinkering with it, and there are some small things I liked about the old theme better, but… you’ll find that the comments aren’t so narrow.

So let us know what y’all think…

15 thoughts on “Do y’all like this design better?

  1. Mark Stewart

    This is better. As a perpetrator of waywardness, or at least as someone who jumped on an off-topic thread last week, minimizing the direct replies to comments on a post will help keep the conversation from fragmenting into a thousand narrow shards of this-and-that.

    Overall, this thing of yours is moving along nicely.

  2. Steven Davis II

    Yes.

    Don’t know if you need the HTLM tag instructions below though… 90% of the people won’t know what they are.

  3. Libb

    Yes…much easier on the eyes.

    The security certificate message that Mark S. reported earlier is still popping up on my desktop.

    1. Brad Warthen Post author

      Yeah, it seems like a lot of white space to me, too, especially on my iPhone.

      But then, I am someone who has an almost religious aversion to white space. Back when I was paginating The State’s editorial pages, I had full control of every square millimeter on the page via Quark XPress, and I would eliminate every stray bit of white space, without mercy. (When others did the pages, which was usually the case, and had trouble fitting everything on the page, I’d go in behind them and show them how — death to white space.)

      Now, my objection is more aesthetic, since on the Web you can have any among of white space, and unlimited room for gray words. Not a zero-sum game, the way it was in print.

      Anyway, I lack the skill/ability to squeeze out white space the way I used to on the printed page. These templates don’t envision that kind of nitpicking control. And it seems that all of these themes that have other functionality I like also have too much white space.

      If I ever have the means for a full, custom redesign, I’ll push to get all the white space out. Until then, I console myself with newfound functionality…

    2. Steven Davis II

      Then get a real computer. It was just the opposite with the short-lived previous version… page width was about 30% text and 70% white space. This newer template is just the opposite for us normal computer users.

  4. Bryan Caskey

    I like the minimalist design overall, and I have been wanting more functionality in the comments sections for links and such. So, it appears we can now use HTML in the comments. Here’s a test.

    Wall Street Journal

    That should be a link to the front page of the Wall Street Journal site. Did that work?

  5. Dave Crockett

    I like being able to usesome the html tags I used to hand code back when I first started web authoring with a text editor.

    And the format is easier to read on my Mac. 🙂

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