The first design comes from Phil. As he has just one name, I shall assume he is like Cher or Madonna so I should just know him. His design doesn't do much with the header, but he experiments extensively with the menu. Breaking out the sections is a good idea I think. I'm not sure about moving the entire menu structure up top tho- I think it makes the page feel really wide. He uses a pull down menu system which I think has some potential. I'm not sure if instead we should put a pulldown menu on the side. The articles themselves are in newly styled boxes which work pretty well. I'm not sure if I like his abbreviated style- the really light green looks kind of weak against the much stronger greens of the titles and footers of the articles... and when you place 2 articles adjacent, you see that dark green line, then the white spacing, then the dark green bar of the next section. It's a bit much. I don't care for how he abbreviated the articles in the 'science' box. All in all, I think this design is solid, but it would take a lot of work to clean it up to be a true winner.
Jarques "Retro_X" Pretorius's design is only a jpg, so no thoughts on actual implementation. He once again moves the section list up top. Also he moves the seach box. A reasonable design decision. I sorta like how the topic icons look embedded into the center column. It makes them LOOK good... but as with so many designs, those topic icons just don't serve a lot of purpose. This isn't his fault- it's mine. The space populated by those icons was originally intended to house the advertising on Slashdot, but that space turned out not to work since ad styles need to chang so much. I think the left & right sides of this design uses white, light green, and 2 shades of grey as background colors. I think that's just to much. Again, there are a lot of really great ideas in here, but I think it will take work for it to be seriously considered.
Neeld Tanksley's design has a lot going for it. But chief among his design decision was to use to indent italics like a block quote. I think this looks nice, but it doesn't work consistently on Slashdot. Some stories might have 2-3 quotes... sometimes very short. So I think that it wouldn't work reliably, visually. I think the abbreviated article view gets lost here. I like his handling of the icons within the articles. They really look nice above the lighter shade of green, although I suspect some of the drop shadowed icons won't work. THe faded icon thing atop the page looks ok, but as with most designs, they really prove how worthless those icons are. The menu and the slashboxes are allright. Same for the header. There are again, many good ideas here.
Patrick Durst's Design is fully CSSd, and uses some itneresting ideas on teh side menu. I think with some work, hsi menu structure might work really well for Slashdot. Unfortunately I thin kthe rest of hsi design is sort of boring. His abbreviated article view is more interesting than his titlebar view. And the slashboxes on the right hand of the screen are just... well.. squares. Since his implementation is CSS, it's worth noting that his search box in the footer doesn't quite line up right. All in all, the menu on the left hand side is this design's strong suit, nad it's why I share this one with you. This design (as well as a few others today) are addressing our menu clutter problems in different ways. I think that this is a quite successful attempt. The onyl thing that DOESN"T work here is that only one menu stays open. I think we'd want Vendors, Services, and Sections at least open by default. Help, Stories, and About could be contracted by default since those are relatively unncessary for most users. Preferences/Login deserves special treatment.
Next, Adam Marsh's design is only as yet a jpg, but he's definetly trying stuff. The slash design element is carried throug hthe header and sidebar. It looks quite nice. I generally don't like to abbrevviate '/.' in punctuation form, but this design is solid enough to consider it seriously. I don't think the topic icons in the right corner works. Unfortunately this design drops topic icons from the articles entirely. I'm not opposed to that decision, but I do tend to feel like something is lacking. I'm not sure about the use of red for links, but I think it's ok. I've had probably a half dozen designs match slashdot's shade of green with orange. This is a better contrast I think.
the last design for today comes from Peter Lada and i think is one of the coolest we've seen. His handling of articles is elegent. While he doesn't deviate much in the left hand menu, I think it all looks really solid. His header is really minimal and I dig it. I miss the old Coliseo font, but his choice to drop the topic icons and move the search box up top is solid. I like his 'Old Stuff' box, as well as how he handled 'Book Reviews'. This is probably one of my favorite designs in terms of just plain 'Look'. It doesn't deviate very far from today's layout. That might be this particular design's weakness- other designs have gone further with good results.
I have probably 20 more designs in my inbox worth commenting on. But I'll save that for later.
Also, i'm letting readers comment in this journal entry. I've not allowed that before, so please be nice. I have infinite moderator points and have no problem using them in my journal.
updates addressing comments here so everyone reads them:
I've had probably 15 or so "Real" designs submitted. Half were (ahem) bad or just not at all what I'm looking for. What follows is a couple of them They aren't necessarily the best, but each has a few things about it that I like that i thought was worth sharing to help give everyone guidance.
first I have a design from Sujay Thomas. I like that this design is CSS. I think the handling of the topic icons in the corner is a bit clumsy. I think the margins are a bit excessive. I think the bars on the left and right need a bit of work. But I think the center column is clean, simple and very readable. I don't think that this design will win without some work: i think it might be to minimal for what I'm looking for. It's also a bit high contrast for my tastes.
Next up I have Hallvar Helleseth's design. Now he is missing a lot of navigational elements, and I'm not sure what the 0-1-2 thing is behind the topic icons, but the design itself is a dramatic departure from Slashdot today, and I respect that. He tries something unique with the topic icons. I'm not sure that the earthtone color scheme is quite what I'm looking for, but I give him huge props for going somewhere unique. The 'More Slashdot' button atop the page shows you some ideas for where he is going with navigational elements. I think the left and right sides of the pages need a bit more differentiation, and there are a few missing elements that aren't properly classed, but this is another solid starting point. I like the reflection on the logo.
Dan Theman's Entry is just plain funny.
The final entry I will comment on today is a design from Philip Dhingra. First off, it is worth noting that his entry is a jpg- far from the CSS that I hope to ultimately see winning. His article space is clean and legible. Good choice on the data formatting. Moving the department line is interesting. His handling of the topic icons is unique, and a nice way to get around the limitations the icons present. He loses a few bits of information (story section for example) and explicitly labels the icons- I'd prefer not to label the icons. I want them to visually stand by themselves. I'm not sure about his left hand menu. But hsi choice to put the user information in the upper right hand corner is solid. It makes excellent use of the space. Likewise, his clean handling on the right of the slashboxes is really cool. Of the designs presented today, this is the most developed in terms of "Design" but the least developed in terms of "CSS". But I can't wait to see where this one goes.
a few random notes
so far nobody has tried a CSS expanding/contracting menu for the left hand side. Given the huge amount of space the menu takes up, I'm kind of surprised.
WRT the topic icons at the TOP of the page- I think that those are expendable.
WRT topic icons, tons of people suggested automated ways of converting them to pngs and such. Others suggested contsts seperate from this one to convert them. I'm open to anything, but as I stated originally, I think working with the icons we have is the most sane plan. But all my rules are flexibile here.
Most of the designs so far have really shrunk down the logo in the top left. I think thats fair: it's pretty huge right now and probably could use a trimming. Get the readers to the articles faster.
I have a lot more designs in my inbox that I plan to post here and comment on during the upcoming days.
The pretty pink april fools day theme was my idea, but implemented by kathleen. The ponies thing was all her. As was some of the wordings, as well as the link to cute overload- a site that got pretty well slashdotted. Sorry about that.
the most interesting part of the day was the things that occured in the tagging system. We'll get some really good data out of the whole thing. Most of the tagging was done in good humor (although some users were understandably offended). But the system can only get better with the data we collect here.
I leave for LinuxWorld in like 6 hours. If you're going to be in Boston for the show, much of Slashteam will be in some sort of lounge area on the show floor tuesday. I think we're also there a fair bit on thursday. Wednesday is mostly sourceforge folks.
I always have mixed feelings on LWCE. I'm not a huge fan of travel in the first place. This year OSTG has a booth for the company which I'm expected to sit in for much of the show. It's been several years since I did this. It's not that it's hard- we just sit and work in a public place instead of a private one. Sometimes users pester us, but most folks are really cool.
I believe there will be wireless net access, so you're welcome to show up and just hang for a bit. We'll be the ones who's skin is pealing off from the flourescent lighting.
Today I finally found the perfect way to represent my town. This Trailer Hitch perfectly sums up Dexter. It was photographed just outside our office door. It raises many questions- not the least of which is How do you Get Away With That? With all the PC crap, is not a nutsack trailer hitch beyond the bounds of good taste? Now mind you the owner of this truck is my new hero. Personally, I think children ought to see things like this whenever possible. It builds character. It will make them strong.
The truck pulled away moments later. Gone forever. But I like to believe that he's just down the road, at the local elementary school picking up his own child amidst the throngs of screaming young'uns.
the most important part of this to US is that after a URL has been bookmarked, you have the option to write a journal about it, or submit it directly to the Slashdot authors for consideration as an article.
Also you can write a journal entry about it. Journal users will note a new function as well, a Submit to Slashdot function is now included in the Journal form. ticking that box will submit your story to the editors for consideration as a story.
The concept is roughly that you can now use the post-to-slashdot javascript to bookmark a URL. Then, once bookmarked you can write a journal entry about it. And when you check the appropriate box, that story is submitted to the editors. It's all quite simple, and it allows you to blog/submit/bookmark in one place.
Also bookmarks are taggable, so please try to tag them as best you can. We have a lot of stuff coming to this, but for now it's all in testing so please give feedback.
Our fax machine started making a strange noise a few weeks ago. A clicking/popping/mechanical sort of noise. The sort of noise that pretty clearly indicates that the unit is ready to be retired. So I unplugged it. The noises stopped. Peace and tranquility returned to my environment. All is well.
This morning jeff arrived and actually needed to send a fax. Since this happens approximately once a quarter, he was understandably upset that the fax machine wouldn't work. It wouldn't even turn on any more.
What happened next was a blur- sort of Orange County Chopper combined with Office Space. The evidence I present to you now:
We all feel much better.
I make mistakes. I'm only human. But i really hate when the feedback mechanism breaks down. And it really is depressing getting 100 messages pop into your box telling you how much you suck for a mistake that was totally honest.
Usually i'm pretty good at letting the water roll off my back when people are mean in email. But the last few weeks has seen my inbox take a turn for the viscious. I'm used to hate mail. I'm used to name calling. But lately it just seems like it's getting worse. Or maybe I'm just getting more sensitive to it.
There are a handful of things that people just flat out don't understand about what we do... the main one is the difference between reading "The Bin" and "The Homepage". On a typical day I might read a few hundred story submissions. I might read another hundred pages that are potentially Slashdot material. And during a typical daddy pants shift, I might post a half a dozen.
This occurs day after day. I might delete a submission that 12 hours later is posted by another editor (maybe there is less to choose from at 11pm than there was at 11am... or maybe a better URL came along to a story that was rejected earlier).
So I kind of see the Slashdot Index differently than others. Some days, like when I'm wearing the pants I'm looking at every story very closely. I concern myself with timing, mix, spelling, quality. Other days the stories aren't mine. I see them differently: I see a story i left in the bin with a note saying "Maybe later?" or a story i rejected because it had a crappy URL. I see several stories I've never seen before. I enjoy those the most.
The problem is that over 8 years of submissions, my posts, and other people's posts start blurring together. I've posted over 10,000 stories. I've rejected hundreds of thousands of submissions. Sometimes I'm simply not going to remember a story from 3 days ago posted by someone else. It's not that I didn't read it- it's that I might have read it 30 times in different places.
There are technical solutions that go a long ways... we have a bunch of keyword searching things in the back end that alerts me if a story with similiar words came up in the last week. But that works spottily at best. The real fall back is the fact that most stories are posted 30 minutes early and screened before subscribers. And this works GREAT. Readers let me know about typos or URL problems in advance. Many articles get fixed, updated, and occasionally deleted during this window. Which unfortunately doesn't work if my SMTP server decides to make me wait 45 minutes for my mail. Stupid protocol. I posted a story for 15:14 GMT. At 15:36 I get a ping saying I have mail. I check the window and see dozens of emails telling me, in increasing hostility, about my error. Those emails were sent as early as 15:00. Bah.
We've discussed using IM and such for disseminating time critical information, but the real issue is GETTING the information. By using email, we raise the bar high enough that people don't arbitrarily spam it. If we put a text field right next to the index, we get so much junk it becomes a meaningless stream of worthless data. To much to keep track of. (Yes, we tried). Email works well for this purpose most of the time since it requires at least a tiny bit more effort than filling in a text field and clicking a button. I think it's a psychological thing- a web form is disposable.. and e-mail is more tangible.
And then the conspiracy theories: Submittor X is paying me to post his stories. Submittor Y is being rejected because I hate him. Advertiser Z gets all their stuff submitted because they are paying us Google is paying me to post their stuff. Yesterday a guy yelled at me for rejecting all his Google stories angry that I'm not posting enough about it.
The truth is less interesting- some guys know how to write good submissions so they get picked a lot. Some advertisers create original content that we find appealing. Since we reject 98% or more of all submissions, so the odds that YOUR submission just got rejected are pretty good. And Google is currently a very hot topic. Just like SCO was a few years ago, and KDE/GNOME was a few years before that. And when each of those stories were at their respective zenithseseses, I got hatemail for posting to much and not enough of those too. It's lose lose sometimes.
So anyway, i'm not in the happiest mood lately. The other reason is that yesterday my iMac shit itself. This particular computer is a normally just a dumb terminal containing little more than mail, web browser, and games, so normally this would be no big deal. Unfortunately i've been working for several weeks now to digitize my families home movies from the 80s, and edit them down as a christmas present for my parents.
The actual digitizing and editing has gone relatively smoothly. But this work in the last few weeks has created 80+ gigs of data that I obviously haven't backed up yet.
Now fortunately the hard drive is OK and it appears that only the operating system blew up. OS X won't let me reinstall tho, so I'm going to have to reformat. So now this machine is mounted as a firewire drive and i'm trying to copy everything over. The problem now is that it takes iDVD like 12 hours of master a DVD... and Christmas is this weekend... so I need to get all 3 DVDs finished, mastered, and copies burnt for relatives. I had plenty of time until my video editing machine needed to barf!
Anyway... it's been a long couple of weeks for me. I'm looking forward to a bit of a holiday break. Maybe it will bring a little more civility to my inbox.
We knew light mode would irritate people so let me discuss it a bit here: Light Mode serves two seperate purposes: to provide a low bandwidth Slashdot for people with slow network connections, and to provide people who want a simplified design with just that.
The plan is to seperate those two tasks. The latter is simply new CSS themes targetted to a handful of common design desires. Since the site degrades relatively well, simply using "No" stylesheet actually accomplishes much of what light mode did anyway.
The bandwidth issue is trickier since it requires some actual code logic. Simple things like stripping out a lot of the menus and slashboxes that people don't need is a huge start. It's relatively simple to do but time consuming to do it right.
All of this is actually relatively minor simply because the number of people who actually use light mode number in the hundreds, and its hard to justify spending several days of work writing code to please such a small group, especially because when you get down to that level, they actually want a dozen different things. Some want "Feature Complete" and others want "Stripped Down For Handheld XXX" and others want something in the middle. Facts are we can't appeal to EVERY desire, but we sure do try where it makes sense.
The good news is that the code is in CVS, and now that we have stylesheets, a lot of things that were "Impossible" under the old code are probably just a couple lines in a custom stylesheet.
A few people asked about a redesign of Slashdot which I made mention of in the announcement yesterday. If you want to get started, the gist of it is that Yes, we will have some sort of contest. What prizes? What Rules? When? I have no idea. But if those silly little limitations don't scare you, and you want to get cracking now, let me make a few suggestions:
With CSS wrapping up, Slashteam is ready to take on some new projects. Pudge has been working on a new form validation system that is more extensible. This will make new forms of validation easier to add, and better error messages. Also the search system is due for a rewrite. The API is designed and the front end is mostly complete. Now its just a matter of building new guts so that it actually finds the right stories. And don't get me started on the moderation system rewrite: after a number of biz related needs (subscriber stuff and daypass advertising stuff) we're finally ready to return to the beast that is Moderation.
Which is where you come in. If you know a thing or two about CSS and web design, I'd appreciate a look at the site. You can email me if you have specific feedback, comments, criticism. I'd especially like it if people logged in and played with that. You'll notice that a lot of form elements look different. Some intentionally. Some because we haven't actually got around to creating CSS stylesheet entries for the dozens of custom things out there. Also, the comment code itself is completely unchanged. The display of forums will remain pretty much icky old HTML until we either (A) Rewrite the engine (which is planned, but a big project or (B) Someone submits a patch that does it for us. So if you want your chance to get your name in lights on Slashdot, this is a project worth considering. There's a mailing list and a CVS server. What are you waiting for?
The Slashdot CSS theme itself is well underway- the core HTML you see on www.slashcode.com is almost exactly what will be on Slashdot itself, we just need to finish a few parts, fix a few bugs, and work finish the Slashdot Stylesheet. We're looking to have that done in the next few weeks, although actually deploying it on Slashdot itself is a pretty huge project. I want to do it in august since it's usually really quiet, and we have a lot of data that needs to be converted in addition to the actualy site templates.
Pudge has been working a lot on that problem. Specifically we've got scripts to fix HTML in all editor & user contributed content spaces. A lot of this is under way already. Old comments are being automatically fixed in the background. HTML in articles from 1998 is being corrected. Scripts are working very hard. And in some cases, tired editors have been re-reading stories from 1998 to correct HTML errors that boggle the mind. None of this is perfect, so don't be to surprised if you find something wonky. Feel free to mail me URLs if you see it. We've got almost 60,000 articles, 900,000 users, and like 13 million comments. There will be mistakes.
Lastly, once Slashdot has successfully been ported to CSS, we'll have a lot more design flexibility. I expect that soon after we'll actually be ready to give the tired old design a facelift. If anyone has ideas, you can start playing with designs today by simply modifying www.slashcode.com's CSS stylesheet. my guess is we'll have a contest similiar to the T-Shirt contest we ran awhile back- users can contribute designs and I'll select from the best a new look for Slashdot. I'm really looking forward to that. I'll miss having Slashdot be "My" design, but the site still looks like 1997 and it's time for new life to go with fancy new web technology.
Also, my rogue hit 60 in WoW a few days ago. I also made my Volcanic armor set and have a few nifty other items w/ high fire resist. Now to get attuned and visit that toasty place known as Molten Core! And somehow save another 400gp for my epic mount. There's just no end to this game.
I've seen some pretty terrible abuses of this problem, but usually it's relatively minor. I've been toying with an idea to solve this problem to at least some extent- essentially, if the same IP replies to itself using a different nickname or anonymously, we auto-moderate the reply down. We can exclude proxy servers from this. We could expand this to only allow a single nickname to post within a single forum, but I don't know how many false hits that would catch in the net.
The idea of allowing anonymous posting is that sometimes you need to say something that for very real, very legitimate reasons, you don't want your name attached to it. The logic behind this is that if you're trying to alternate between signing your name and not, you're more likely to be abusing the system than to be using it legitimately.
Thoughts? A few of you can post. Others can email.
My WoW Dwarven Paladin on Algazor hit level 26, and Drew/Thorzin from my guild took me on the whirlwind tour to get my mega hammer of bringin-the-hurt-in. I had the first 2 components, but the fourth component required us to haul ass into horde territory. The game continues to amaze me. After 2 weeks of fairly excessive gameplay, I still have only explored a half dozen maps- maybe 5-10% of the world? You seriously could play this game for MONTHS. Which I guess makes sense given the number of level 60 characters with 30-40 game *days* into their chars. Highly addictive. Kathleen's mage is a few levels behind me. Gnomes are adorable. I like to play with her just to here her cheer when we do something neat.
Slashdot's CSS port continues to move along. Tim has the basic stuff done for the generic slashcode theme. We're waiting for Wes to finish mocking up some of the lesser used pages (like journals and user preferences). After we roll those into the slashcode theme, the actual task of moving Slashdot to CSS will likely take only a few more days since it will just be mangling around the CSS files, and the actual slashcode themes will become relatively set in stone. Look and feel can be easily twiddled by editing the css templates, and slashcode itself won't need to be changed. Man HTML has come a long ways in the decade since I started.
And I'd just like to wish a happy birthday to my beautiful wife.
With just one night home I packed up and went to Cleveland (which is nothing like Howard the Duck made it out to be) to speak at Case Western. The talk went really well. The audience seemed very responsive. Clearly a large contingent of hardcore Slashdot readers. They even hooked me up with fantastic prizes to give away. I tried to use my cellphone as a clicker for the presentation, which usually works, but the stars were apparently misaligned... oh, and I tend to pace when I talk... right out the range of bluetooth devices
This afternoon I'm going to visit the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame which everyone tells me is a glorious waste of time... but they are doing a huge Tommy exhibit and my obsession with Pete Townshend knows no limits. So therefore it beckons to me like... well... WoW.
After the drive back to michigan I think I get to stay "Home" for several weeks. That will be great. Time to level and pet the kittens.
I'm playing on Azgalor and actually got my real nickname so feel free to say hi or mail me cool toys. I'm running a level 11 dwarven paladin and having a quite enjoyable time of it now that I have a decent mace and can actually kick out enough damage to kill things. I've run most of the quests so far with Kathleen (who is running a gnomish sorc). The hype is right: WoW really took everything from its predecessors and just kinda said "Fuck it all, lets do it right." Unfortunately I also have real life to contend with... real responsibilities take away from getting a piece of miner gear or something so that I can get that sweet sweet XP. I need to sit down and decide upon a path for my char. What abilities and such I wish to focus on. And strategies for making my char more effective.
I have maxed out my vacation time, so I guess I could just take a week off and play... but that might be a little foolish. Maybe every OTHER day for a couple weeks!
Penguicon is this weekend. I've heard of a number of people that are going, but so far there's been no real demand to organize any sort of Slashdot extravaganza. I'll be speaking somewhere, and hopefully showing my fandubs in the anime room. Should be good times. Or I'll just sit in my hotel room and try to level.
A few weeks ago we brought hardware.slashdot.org online with relatively little fanfare. Like IT before it, it representes little in the way of new content, but it will offer users a way of finding specific subject matter. I was supposed to have 'entertainment.slashdot.org' up around the same time, but this has gone poorly. So here is a bunch of logos that Kathleen & I worked out for the section. We never found one that we really liked... so I'm throwing this out as a challange to any of you readers... try to design an entertainment logo... it needs to have the curve, and the word 'Slashdot' in the font Caliseo in it. Colors, backgrounds, everything else is up for grabs. I promise at least a t-shirt if we use your design (plus the immeasurable value of me plugging you in my journal... you can almost smell the 31337).
I'm actually travelling a lot in the next few weeks. Penguicon, California, Cleveland, Tokyo, and possibly Vegas. 5 trips in about 7 weeks. The new Pokemon emerald comes out in a few weeks, so that could keep me company on long flights... otherwise I may have to buy a PSP. I've resisted so far. It's taken every oz. of willpower I don't have. Me want. Me want much.
"You need tender loving care once a week - so that I can slap you into shape." - Ellyn Mustard