CmdrTaco's Journal: Slashdot gets a Tummy Tuck?

"You're not an official slashteam member until an AC pisses on your work." --Jamie

Ok, I might be paraphrasing a bit. Tim Vroom joined Slashteam in the last few weeks. Tim replaces Krow, who left us to go work for MySQL. We all will miss Krow and his great contributions to Slashcode... but long live Tim! Tim might be known to some of you through Perl Monks, a site based on the Everything 2 engine, and built a few years back as one of the various exciting Blockstackers projects... of which Slashdot was the first.

So Tim's first project larger than a few lines was reworking the left hand menu on all of Slashdot. In fact, this might be the largest change to Slashdot's homepage since mid 1998 when we moved the banner ad out of the space now consumed by 5 topic icons, and above the page. That change was done so we could accomodate standard banner ads. This change was done to improve legibility and clarity for new and old users on Slashdot.

There were several things that needed fixing in this menu change.

• Replacing obscure acronyms with more clear links... hof became Hall of Fame. I just got sick of people emailing me asking for a top 10 stories page when we've had one for like 5 years.
• Provide login and subscription information on the left hand side. I hope to eventually expand this menu slightly. I want the menu to provide a bit more context for user preference functions. But at that point, it means actually generating the menu dynamically, and right now the chrome around most pages is static and stored until updates are needed.
• The section menu was the largest change. We reworked it to provide several changes: (A) Keep it all above the scroll bar at a reasonable browser resoltuion (B)Use it to provide context: the section you are in is highlighted (C) Clarify that each subsection has additional content not available on Slashdot. I think we were successful at all 3 goals, and am very pleased. I'm hoping these fixes will help users understand sections better... and will help the noobs not get so lost.

Within 4 minutes, the first anonymous coward post appeared (Offtopic, Score: -1) in a discussion proclaiming the new feature "Totally Gay". Which officially means that Tim is now part of Slashdot! His work is ridiculed by a stranger unwilling to sign his name! My personal email feedback on the change is 4:1 in favor of the new menu, and my personal opinion is that this is a dramatic improvement to Slashdot's layout and user interface. But it is still only a baby step.

There are still a variety of issues... like static pages (hof, about, faq) will ask you to log in, even tho you actually are. This is a legacy of how we generate headers and use them in static pages. I can think of 2-3 ways to solve this, but each has performance issues to consider. But we'll fix that sooner or later.

And welcome aboard tim! (vroom... at slashdot dot org if you wanna say thanks in person. He's earned it)

Thanks

[pudge]

Tim!

Pees

[jamie]

I think I said "pees," not "pisses." You make me sound so vulgar.

Re:Pees

[Hemos]

At least we didn't quote your real statements. You're a potty mouth, hidden inside a sweet talker. I KNOW YOU MCCARTHY! I BET YOU DON'T EVEN EAT MEAT!

Ahem.

Looks nice, Tim.