Oh, hello there. We come to announce some changes are ahead. The sort of changes regarding which the vast majority of you will not give a fruity fig. But our watchword is "always inform! Always disclose!" in these parts, and, so: there is a very good chance that this website will look a bit different tomorrow. You are welcome to read on if you are interested.
In short: we're rebranding as a newly wholly-owned subsidiary of Cat Fancy magazine.
Okay, we are not, but wouldn't that be awesome? I WOULD ENJOY.
For real, though, we are making some visual changes. This is what they call, in the professional industry, a "redesign," I think! (I don't really know what goes on in the professional industry, it turns out.)
There are at least two whole benefits here.
1. Individual entries, and the front page as well, will be much more legible, in my opinion. This is for the benefit of people who like to read things! There will be space and room for big pretty pictures also and, like, room to breathe. There should also be easier commenting interfacing and the like, for the kids that like the Internets.
2. We're also making room for our publisher-friend David Cho to sell some ads. Yes, there will be a relaunch sponsor. You know why? Because we are getting closer to our dream of doing something called "paying writers." I know that you guys are really into that particular endeavor, so thanks for being supportive in this regard. (Check back, um, soonish. Did you know that the average time window in which most folks pay for their advertising is like, net 240 days? I didn't either! That is the biz, my friends. The real world? We are happy just to live in it.)
Oh, and, 3. Alex Balk finally had a slight meat-related stroke and so he won't be blogging quite as coherently starting tomorrow, but that's okay. Probably for the best and all.
To sum up: the same ol' website, with a little bit of shininess, and a bit worse array of word choices from Alex.
QUESTIONS? COMMENTS? COMPLAINTS? Do let me know.
Also we reserve the right to launch this redesign later in case tonight's late-night/early-morning deployment goes into the crapper. Anyway, see you before that, during LOST. Please have completed your assigned Thorstein Veblen readings beforehand.
God I hope I won the logo contest! *crosses fingers*
The submission deadline has passed already? I just finished my design!
I was so pissed when Camel changed the package. I let Marb Reds kill me now.
I kind of was too!
Felt the same way when Winston took the flying eagle off the package.
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO FILTERED LUCKY STRIKES!?
"paying writers."
?????????
Isn't the against the rule of the internets?
P.S. For a sneak peek: http://www.radaronline.com/
Will you be brought to us by REGULAR Dr. Pepper? Or Mr. Pibb?
uh, on that radaron site thingy...
NO ME GUSTA
NO ME GUSTA
blaring assault gobs red all red hurt
Don't worry. Our gobs are blue.
well then, lull me you sweet sirens.
JUSTIN MENTELL IS DEAD!?
I KNOW! In Wisconsin!
Not pink enough.
HOT BEAR PHOTOS GALLERY
Mr Pibb of course, cause it's the bullshit Dr Pepper.
Sploid 2.0?
Wasn't there going to be a big Sploid relaunch last year? Seems like I remember something about that on one of those Denton missives, back when I was getting such things.
Paywawl?
ooh. double good.
pay-sploid.com
I should say: I liked Sploid.
I knew something was wrong with A Balk when his 'etc.' rate seemed somewhat over-aggressive in the roast beef review.
Can you make little subscription cards that fall out and get all wet and gross when I'm reading in the bath, or else fall out on the subway and I have to hang on to them because I feel guilty BUT ONCE THEY FALL OUT THEY WILL NOT FUCKING GO BACK INTO THE MAGAZINE FOR MORE THAN TWO MINUTES.
By that I mean, of course, Spyware.
Totally on board this initiative.
If theawl.com deploys spyware, let me offer my apologies upfront.
The repeated viewings of Single Ladies are totally my gay best friend and not me.
I always assumed that Denton's point with Fleshbot was to cross-compile porn preference profiles of NYC's media industry
I demand more explanation of Balk's intentions if he is to blog less. What will he do? How will he eat?
I hate to be reactionary and say 'unsubscribe'...but unsubscribe.
I don't understand, sorry. However, please to be on your way if you object to my perfectly natural question.
I miss the e-mails.
Yeah.
Werd.
I was hoping for bear wallpaper.
For you:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/107179/desktop.jpg
Hopefully this fits your screen resolution?
Hahaha awesome
Well, the image of the lady friend just got relegated to the "pictures" folder. Hello new wallpaper.
Servicey! Thanks!!!
Everything passes
Everything changes
Just do what you think you should do
And who know, baby,
Someday, maybe
I'll come and be cryin' to you.
I hope Balk is alright ?
me too, maybe a little too much?
Ben Stein looks pleased. That's scary.
Provided it means something dirty and/or user name and password boxes that don't hide underneath the Most Viewed thingy, I guess the "easier commenting interfacing" sounds alright. Maybe!
But if it means attracting/enabling the less less stupid? DON'T. EVEN.
I have a complicated answer to that question. Let's assume that no one is reading that far down.
I think that we will become, as time goes on, a site that *appears* as if it might harbor the stupid. But actually it will continue to largely repel them. (And others.) KNOW WHAT I'M $AYING?
*(San Pellegrino shoots out of my nose thnx)
$A$HAY TO TOWN
You're not taking away the American Apparel ads are you? Makes browsing fun when in the company of a skanky lady.
relax, there's still plenty of skank, though Sarah Silverman's no lady.
Will you still have the day/month/date/year at the top of the homepage every day? Please tell me you will!
I come here to find out what day, month, date and/or year it is, whenever I forget. Which is often.
I feel your pain. I forgot it was Groundhog Day, even after reading the post about Groundhog Day.
I remembered about twenty minutes ago.
Then did you remember again, twenty minutes later?
YOU HAVE NO IDEA.
Turn and face the strange!
Will the site still refresh arbitrarily with new impatient recipes like some sort of angry cooking starfish?
AND HOW.
As long as there are still secret, all-caps messages embedded as tooltips in the images, we're cool.
i feel that.
(nodding)
OH MAN OH RIGHT I TOTALLY HOPE SO I LOVE THOSE.
...
...
Okay, I didn't know about that at all. Last one to every party.
Hmmm...Still in the "dark" about Balk. Please tell me he is not otherwise employable?
Oh he's fine. "Fine" as he ever was.
"and a bit worse array of word choices from Alex"
Worse than this? I call bullshit. I also applaud the redesign idea, and the getting paid thing. You guys totes deserve it. Love you mean it.
Haha. HUGS.
So Balk heard everyone was getting paid, and said, "Fuck this, I'm outta here," I gather.
You posted this at 4:44. And as I post this there are 44 comments. I am now... the 45th!!!
I'd play the numbers if I were you. 444. Bet. With money.
Just for fun, here's something from #1444
1444!
1 + 4 = 5
5 + 4 = 9
9 + 4 = 13
And then with 13:
1 + 3 = 4
Makes you think!
Father logic sometimes gets cosmic, you know.
So ... your redesign is going to make my monitor larger?
Yaaay redesign! I think.
veblen is the shit. Theory of the Leisure Class, FELLAS!
I especially like the background pattern at the top of the page. It reminds me of the wallpapers you could choose for the Macintosh SE.
It makes me feel more separated from myself. But I had that from the get-go.
Anyhow. This is, um, exciting.
But did you see, hon, that they're letting you edit now?
You always knew you'd get the promotion you so dreamed of that entire time.
You know who would've loved this redesign? Balk.
(I'm not *thrilled* about the border now showing around my avatar, but *apart* from that, great job guys)
Wow. You do look really different.
Work, work, get that cash! In 240 days.
NICE REDESIGN!
I love it! And i am your severest critique in the looks department (silently, of course).
Congratulations, this is good.
Um, I do not think I am hip/cool enough for the redesign.
Yeah, how do you turn off that background music? It's just too early for acid house
Wow. It's a brave new world. 3.0 is pretty cool IMHO
There are good parts and bad parts to the redesign. The top bar is hideous. But wasted Jolie is terrifyingly prominent in the good way. And "Least Viewed" provides easy access to kickable orphans, and who can crap on that?
Also, QUICKLINK QUICKLINK QUICKLINK QUICKLINK JESUS FUCKING CHRIST AIGH.
The only thing that I don't like about the top bar is the captions, which are kind of loud. My first instinct is to take them out of the photos entirely, but that takes up extra space. Barring that, I might give the div the background, rather than the span (which would require some discipline in caption length), or have a separate background div with opacity:0.6; and either discipline or FANCY WEB MAGIC to make it the right size.
The previous paragraph makes me sound way into discipline!
The thing that I'm most going to need convincing on, though, are the green shouty boxes. Why are all the photos shouting? It's possible I will adjust to having snowmen shout NEW YORK CITY at me every time I view the homepage, but for the moment it is still a little jarring.
WHERE ARE MY DOUBLE LINE BREAKS AAAAARGH
Except, wait, it's actually "Most Least Viewed".
DOUBLE PLUS UNGOOD
This is like professional and shit! Congrats! It's like it's a grown up now!
Links to number of comments on homepage still does not actually link to comments section of a post.
I don't know why you people insist on the Windows abomination of neutral quotation marks and apostrophes. You Awl use Macs and the easy keystrokes for correct characters have been stable since 1984.
Your print CSS is quite awful.
You want I should validate your code later? Because that's so horrifically difficult for your developers to do.
Do you also do children's parties?
Why else do I keep the purple hat? (I also have green and electric blue, but that one's time-and-a-half.)
please please just a different shade of green. it really hurts my eyes.
My word, is that the temperature up there? Whose is it?
And also: sucker's taking an enormous long while to load. I know--it's a big load.
I like the temperature, but there should be a dropdown for choosing oral or rectal.
When's the Commenter Meetup again?
HOLY SHIT LOOK AT THIS THING. WOW.
So is the Blue(gray?)- White dichotomy like red red state/blue state?
So, despite the site being a lot bigger, where exactly will the 728x90 ads go? Odd to think this kind of reworking would widen the site yet not allow that standard size be placed.
I just saw enormous amounts of pharmaspam below the footer. Disappeared when I logged in to comment. Just FYI!
I haven't seen this on this site, but this usually indicates a an older version of wordpress with a security hole that's been hacked.
Post text doesn't flow around the post image on the front page, but does flow around the image when you click through to the post. Example.
Why is the text smaller on the front page than on the individual post pages?
As this comment notes it would be nice to have a little whitespace between paragraphs in the comments (you already do this in the main posts).
You should visually distinguish the "READ MORE" links (background color? different link color?). They're capitalized, but they don't really stand out from the text of the post, so it's harder to tell if there is indeed more to read.
Why is the "Leave a Comment" text box + gray border narrower than the actual comments?
The category badges ("New York City", "Opinion", "What A World", etc.) on each post are links, but they don't link to anything. Is this a placeholder for future category / tag archives?
The "Quicklink" category badges seem unnecessary and look a little strange. Those posts are already in the flow of the page and have no READ MORE link attached so why bother to call them out? i.e. it is sort of self-evident that they are just quick link posts. I'd just leave those badges off, while still badging the other articles. (Unless, perhaps, as per above, you have plans to have them link to some kind of archives in the future?)
The options in the right sidebar are: "Most: Viewed", "Most: Recent", "Most: Commented", and "Most: Least Viewed". Most least viewed?
If I click the "Reply" link after a comment, but then decide I'd rather not reply, but would rather post my own comment down at the bottom of the page, there is no way for me to cancel out of the reply comment and get back to the original state with the comment box down at the bottom. Or, rather, to do so I must reload the whole page.
What I like:
From the front page title links on posts, "read more" links on post and the comment count badge link all go to to the same post permalink rather than to random anchors halfway down the post page.
The site looks a lot better and is a lot more legible! (Comments in particular, with the alternating gray/white.)
Apparently at the same time of the visual reworking, The Awl's RSS feed has gone a little weird. The title of each post (along with the time of posting) now also appears in the body of each item large and underlined
To which I'd add: why bother having three feeds in three different formats with the same content? Just get rid of the two RSS feeds, keep the Atom feed, and redirect /feed and /rss to /atom.
Love it. That said,
- Where is the favicon (little Awl logo in the URL bar)?
- The little green flags/topics don't currently seem to serve a purpose - clicking on them leads nowhere
- The "Read More" links at the bottom of the posts should be more prominent
- The "secret, all-caps messages embedded as tooltips in the images" are now "double-secret, all-caps messages embedded as tooltips in the images" because you need to actually open the full article and hover over the image to see it, which saddens me.
- I'm sure the temp/weather are for NYC, but perhaps make that explicit?
- Clicking the number in the comment bubbles below stories on the main page doesn't lead directly to the comment section of the post.
Also, I actually love the "most least viewed" option. Awesome redesign.
Also, editing comments, while an awesome feature, doesn't currently work for me, and should probably be limited to avoid crazy alterations far in the future.