My primary gripe is that Jackhammer Jill doesn’t appear anymore when one hovers over the BoingBoing logo…
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The bottom line is that it was broken – just in ways that didn’t bother you.
Here’s an example: the average download time for the old full-content reverse chron blog front door was about 10 seconds. Sometimes it was 5MB+ of youtubes, GIFs, embeds, social buttons, etc…
It’s something that you never notice when you’re on a computer with a good connection, but it immediately evicts a lot of people from any kind of usability.
I have really tried to like it. I’m not one who immediately rejects change. But I find this design sloppy looking, and very difficult to follow. I think you had evolved gracefully to a modern design that was true to your roots. This new layout feels like a big step backwards. I’m not going to stop coming here because of it, but I hope this design goes back to the drawing boards.
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Adding a second column is going to lower that time?
Jill will be back.
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It’s what’s in the columns that matters.
Sure, but cleaning up the content has little to do with creating a second column and cluttering up the page.
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“eye-ping-pong”
Yes. This. Exactly.
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tl;dr version of this comments thread may be found by clicking here
For those who don’t want to waste their time, it’s an inane, insulting “we fear change” link.
Tavie, I thrive on change. It’s part of my DNA. Yet, I don’t agree with all changes for the sake of change either. That’s not fear of change, that’s using critical thinking.
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eye-ping-pong
Yes. This. Exactly.
Yeah, I thought that @ghostly1 stated that part perfectly as well when I read it. I felt the same way and it literally was giving me a headache, so I’ve closed the boingboing site. I’m just thankful for the alt link here:
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Please keep the “old” link available. The main page is badly broken if you have any kind of accessibility/vision disability addons running. (I have a screenshot, but it’s mainly just empty grey boxes.) Personally I strongly prefer the old layout aesthetically even without this issue, but it’s not my site.
The old page is perfectly content to display text larger or at high contrast for those of us with crap eyesight, and has worked with any of the addons I’ve tried to compensate for said crap eyesight.
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I like that there are so many options. You can use the new layout, the old layout, the bbs, the rss and there are hints that print might be on the horizon. I also respect that Rob not only opened up the design to critique but rolled up his sleeves and engaged in this discussion.
This is a good community and this kind of eruption over a layout change shows that readers have an investment in the site and that they care about what happens here. I think we feel a slight sense of ownership, that we’re part of the club and that’s probably why there are knee-jerk reactions to major, unannounced changes.
I think we’ll survive the redesign 
I think the only mistake was not soliciting feedback from the regular readers before going forward. It would be impossible to appease everyone but there would at least have been some discussion on the front-end leading to a better and more gradual understanding of design choices. And there probably would have been some incredibly brilliant suggestions from the peanut gallery.
Happy 25th. Long live this wheezing jalopy of a super zine.
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That’s a much nicer typeface than comes up in my browser. If I send you my address, can you get someone to come over and figure out why?
I’ve just ried, and it’s still ugly, but it does seem to load faster (tho I’ve just gotten a new machine [yay! Fastness!], so I’m not a representative sample, maybe).
I appreciate that you’re in here discussing all this.
I really appreciate wanting to make the site load faster. That’s something important, that the rest of the internet doesn’t pay enough attention to in this day and age. Our computers and Teh Tubes are so much faster and yet it feels like most pages load about as fast as they did back on dial up.
Just wish not so much of the baby hadn’t been thrown out with that bathwater.
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Disclosure: I just gave a temp ban to a poster – the only ban or even comment moderation in this lengthy thread so far. Criticism is cool, even a little hostility. But don’t make it smarmy and personal, because you’ll lose that fight instantly.
You’re on firefox? We have some kind of nasty firefox css bug. It’ll be fixed.
Aye, Firefox.
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One problem might be that the second and third feature slots are small and next to one another, and visually resemble the blog posts. Sometimes it looks like there’s actually a kind of horizontal bar of three tiles rather than vertical columns.
This one thing strikes me as the main clutter singularity which is interfering with the sense of two separate but parallel chronological streams
I can definitely vouch for this. I in a rural area and have a slow connection (my internet is delivered via line-of-sight microwaves), and I’ve noticed the lag in loading BB’s front page.
A thought on the whole clickbait brouhaha. Having seen the hysterical way it has been discussed in other threads, I can totally understand a possible tendency for a BB editor to tune out the criticisms. And of course part of a headline’s job is to draw attention to the article/post. However…
Insofar as the clickbaitiness was intentional (and Rob’s description of it as “ironic” suggests that it was), it may be something for BB to actively avoid in the future. It is always problematic to critique something by perpetuating it. It smacks of benefiting from the problem on the one hand, while taking a stance against it on the other. Additionally, the irony seems a bit weak given the context… Now if the content of the post was about clickbaiting, then a clickbait headline would be much more amusing.
The fact that BB is a trusted/loved source of information makes the clickbaiting/irony worse, not better. When I see a “One Weird Trick” advertisement at the bottom of a webpage, it seems barely worth taking the time to despise. However, when a friend passes on some clickbait-y piece of content, it is really aggravating (and I’ve noticed that in the last month or so, this has been happening more and more on Facebook). In such situations I’m torn between wanting to ignore it and wanting to know what my friend is finding interesting. I’ve been consciously deciding to ignore in hopes that a trend of ineffectiveness will stop the clickbaiting (good luck, right?).
