A new design for Advogato.

aye

I like it. The only thing which seems a bit weird is how you have the fuzzy/torn borders around the logo and between the sidebar and the main news section, but not between the header and the bottom two areas, it's just a sharp color change there. I'd be interested in seeing that changed some way or another. Other than that, I like it more than the current design.

Nevermind. The first time I looked there wasn't that black line between the header and the main part. Odd. It's there now, and that's fine. :)

I like the new design; it keeps the original overall simplicity of the old design, while making things look a little nicer.

I don't know if I really love the ragged borders, but whatever, it's better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, and at least the overall layout. I tend to look at Advogato through w3-mode anyway, so it's going to look more or less the same to me.

AFAIK Raph hasn't pulled out all the in-line HTML, is this all going to be source code changes? Yuck.

I'd never really even considered using CSS to get the colored borders around stuff, that idea is positively fantastico! I'll see if I can hack that into the yet-to-be-merged tree branch! How would you go about having something that worked with older browsers, though?

Wouldn't this be much speedier (rendering in browsers) if you had explicit rows= and cols= attributes in the table tag? I don't know much about PHP/ASP/<insert other server side processor here> but I would think it wouldn't be that hard to generate a count of processed elements and fill in the rows= and cols= attributs correctly.

I'm pretty fond of tables as layout elements (and most anything that works in the real world: I'm no HTML purist), but I don't see why machine generated HTML shouldn't have descent hinting for the browser where possible (if you're just throwing together HTML by hand, for some throwaway purpose, that's one thing, but when code is doing the work there's no good reason not to have counted all the fiddly bits).

It's nice to see a little more colour on Advogato. Makes night time reading all the easier! ;-) Good work...

I was hoping for a more drastic change, but what's there looks nice. However, the logo looks really out of place now. The torn edges, whilst matching the middle delimeter on the page body, are just too cheesy. Even if you do cover it up with a mouse center stage... ;-)

As that's my only real crit, I'd say run with it.

... although i don't like the boxes around the article titles and diary entries. anyway, i think the new design is nicer than the current one.

i prefer the current design.
i admit, i don't like boxes, but prefer simple clean sites.
the new desing adds nothing that would make it more usefull (not that there was a need for that) and the shades and ragged lines only take away from the simplicity.

greetings, eMBee.

I, too, really like the simplicity of the current design. There's no obvious benefit from this new design, as pleasant-looking as it might be. IMHO, we ought to leave things as they are.

While the design now is "good enough" I think the new design isn't overly complex or anything like that, it just makes the current design easier on the eyes and separates the articles from the diaries from the header a bit better. It's really not *that* big of a change, so I'm all for the new design.

I like the current design better than the new one, simply because of the new designs over-abundance of colored boxes. I'd prefer that the design be much more minimalist than it is even now, something like the slashcode 'simple HTML' mode, which turns off almost all the chrome, leaving only a simplified textual page.

On the good side (for both old and new designs) I think that the multi collumn layout is much nicer than the single column layout in slash simple HTML. As far as I can tell, the double column layout doesn't slow things down too much, and it makes differentiating the separate sections much easier.

Since when did Advogato windows have to be >1000px wide to see the right column without scrolling? I'm sure the right column was fixed-width and the main column expanded and contracted to fill the space available - until today. Am I delusional?

As the new design does this and the current one doesn't, the new one is preferable. Looks nice too - reminds me of something I can't put my finger on, though...

I think the problem arose when the article was posted that had the very long url. It cannot be \'d so it fills the whole horizontal space.

Personally I like the new design, you get my vote to implment it.

I think the new look is pleasant, and remains simple - my one concern is the lack of contrast between some of the coloured boxes (esp. Journeyer posted comments) and the backgrounds.

The new design keeps the minimalist approach, and adds a little color. +1 from me.

In order to make the page render faster (especially in older versions of Netscape), I suggest that you split the top-level table in several parts.

The logo can be included in a paragraph that is directly at the <body> level. The same could be done for the short navigation bar containing the links to [ Home | Articles | ... ]. This would allow these elements to be displayed immediately, even if the browser has not received the full page yet and cannot render the other parts of the page because the size of the table containing the articles is not known yet. So the visitors know immediately that they are on Advogato even if it they cannot read the whole page yet.

I couldn't see any difference between the two. Of course, I run Netscape 4 with no JavaScript, style sheets, Java, images, dynamic fonts, or page-specific colours. Or else I run links (everyone should `apt-get install surfraw'! Shell Users' Revolutionary Front Rage Against the Web!

Anyway, I'd like the one that is stablest and fastest, please.

Regards,

Zooko

The underlining is gone from the links, a dubious practice if you ask me.

Maybe my eyes aren't very good, but I can barely see the difference between that purple and the regular black text!

Give me back my underlining!

Since when did Advogato windows have to be >1000px wide to see the right column without scrolling? I'm sure the right column was fixed-width and the main column expanded and contracted to fill the space available - until today. Am I delusional?

the left column is so wide because of the link in one of the articles below. this link is so long and the browser won't break it _because_ the column is not fixed with, thus making the page wider than wanted.

greetings, eMBee.

I've found it's worth puting <wbr> elements in URLs after every / & or ?, as this can help some browsers -- obviously this is only in textual content, not in an HREF or SRC attribute!

The new design is fine by me. I'd like a <- and a -> by each diary entry in recentlog, linking to the next and previous entries, because I often read the log oldest first. Actually I'd like a "less recent diaries" button too, but that's not a style issue :-)

For that matter, sorting the projects page and putting the one-line descriptions there would help a lot too. If life were longer I'd do a patch, but if life were longer Raph would have done it too!