I feel like I'm the only one who likes it. Very clean and non distracting. The comment control is AWESOME.
Of course, there is lots of room for improvement. Here are some technical performance suggestions:
* Its YSlow grade is C. For a site with such huge traffic as
/. has, it could be better. A good part is due to advertisement and A/B testing. A/B testing should be removed eventually so I will get better. However, there is still a couple of changes that could help:
- Enable GZip compression for javascript files in a.fsdn.com
- Combine comments_minified.js with all-minified.js. It's not worth it to have it separated into a different script. You can just delay the execution. Specially when gzipped it would weight around 6-7kb instead of 30kb.
- Slashdot pages are rather big. I believe that's why you chose to put a lot of javascript in the head. You should consider at least moving it after the article/s. That way the article will be shown faster even if the rest of the page and the comments are delayed a bit.
- It would help a lot to reduce the size of the page. Using the scroll event to show more comments as twitter does could be a good idea. Check out John Resig's latest post about it
http://ejohn.org/blog/learning-from-twitter/
- Extend the life of the cached files. Use "access plus ten years" instead of a two week period. The correct strategy isn't to use the query string to manage versions but to use the filename for it. Rename the all-minified.js file to all-v1-minified.js and change it when needed.
- Add the expires header for logo.png and favicon.ico
- Remove E-tags
- In the homepage, the RSS, facebook and twitter buttons are three different images. You should reuse the sprite from the add-this widget
http://s7.addthis.com/static/r07/widget26_32x32.png and consider writing your own widget and adding it to your main script.