"wuuuu"!
new design
new domain name
I can't believe it!

sorry if this thread is a duplicate

well i think its not perfect yet.. the new design :/
maybe too colorless, and white grey white is well maybe a bit unorganic.

we'll see how it developes^^

The logo has changed too.

If you ask me, it's much better than the previous attempt to redesign the forum :)

Very nice design! I prefer this one than the older!

Looks good (and I have a little icon now :))

Awesome Design... Very Google type... Simple but beautiful...

So refreshing to have the content as the dominant feature.

All I would change is to put the logo on the left, so that I can see it when I'm browsing at 800 pixels wide.

yea, nice.
the grey-bar on the right side instead of the left is very cunfusing.

Cool shadows 2.0

"Above 9 forum comments are from before this was blogged."

Huh?

Comments (9+1)

Realy nice feature :p

(Ionut: Sorry, first bug, even though I thought I had that fixed... above message you're seeing displayed before the post went live, when it was still in draft mode.... it should only display when it's live!)

Aah, much improved interaction between the blog and the forum.

I do wonder, though, why you didn't move the blog to google.blogoscoped.com, to leave open some future possibilities:

   – yahoo.blogoscoped.com
   – msn.blogoscoped.com
   – ask.blogoscoped.com ...

Great to finally see this live; both the domain AND the design!

Just a small point to add. I think you really need a footer. When I loaded this page (below) I thought my browser was hanging because I forgot I was viewing the post page rather than the home page:

blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-0 ...

In your blog post you asked about the ads. I'm seeing rounded corners and real ads from the UK. The white on grey is not the most readable, but it doesn't matter too much.

There's a momentary "blink" before the ad appears and changes its background colour. If I scroll to the bottom, then scroll back up, the scrolling is a bit jerky (I guess because there's more javascript being executed than there was using the old design).

Nothing that I'd count as a problem though.

[Moved – Tony]

blog.outer-court – had a PR 7

blog.outer-court/forum – had a similar high PR

blogoscoped.com/forum/ – PR 0

blogoscoped.com/ – PR 2

The www. redirects to blogoscoped

Typing the old address also redirects

Also, unless the hundreds of old Backlinks are changed from the many high TrustRanked sites – it may possibly affect the rankings.

The site and forum comes up for a variety of search terms in Google from Years of linked to posts

i like so much the "more" link in "google-style.." ;-)

Lots of great helpful comments so far. I'm taking notes :)

Archive page just got fixed: blogoscoped.com/calendar/

forum:

img505.imageshack.us/img505/35 ...

img505.imageshack.us/img505/40 ...

I'm very happy about the changes. The design looks light and professional, but still remains friendly. I never remembered the old domain, so I love the new one. Rounded corners ads in the forum look great, traditional public service ads on the home page not so much (maybe you should disable those?).

There is one issue I think you should think about. I just love pretty URL formats (you know, those blogoscoped.com/archive/post-title.html kind), and Google really loves me for using them.

Ah, thanks. I'm now seeing the first real ads too...

Overall, the new design looks great! Though it's going to take some getting used to content being on the otherside of the colored column now :)

As for the additional navigation, what about giving it a smaller font or putting the "Blog | Forum" option in a bigger font on the line above the rest of the navigation? At the moment it's hard to tell what the "More>>" button is going to do if you haven't been here before.

As for pagerank and overall ranking, I used 301's when switching domains for my blog which was at pagerank 4 or 5 at the time. Within a week or so the new stories I was posting started appearing with good ranking in search results, and it may have been a week or two more before older stories from before the merge started ranking well for the new URL. But as of today my new blog domain shows Pagerank 0 in the Google Toolbar while the old domain still has a 4 even though it doesn't have much of any content on it.

Looks like an encoding error for the apostrophe in the archive. See the last entry for June 1st:
blogoscoped.com/calendar/2007- ...

I'm viewing it via my phone and it's working pretty well. (Tough i'm getting some troubles with it. I'll email you the problems Phillpp)

With regards to moving domains, I moved one of my sites in January from ruscoe.net/genealogy to ruscoe.name and that's now showing a PR4 in Google Toolbar (which is what it used to be). That uses 301 redirects and, until very recently, still had content indexed in Google under [site:ruscoe.net/genealogy]. I also "told" Google Webmaster Tools about the change and submitted a sitemap.xml to help things along.

Looks great. superb work :-)

Love the new design, but your content rules.

Great!

Congrats with the new design. As I am reading most of this blog via Google Reader, I didn't notice at first... I just came along for posting something & then I saw the restyling ;-)

[Updated name from "Great! to "Art-One" – Tony]

Great! was me of course... I even forgot how to post a comment right :<

"Comments (9+20)" > I love it, great idea :-D

Great redesign, though the label on the "Search" button is still too small...

Nice new design! Hopefully it can improve the efficiency of our translation as well. :P

Congrats on the move & the new layout! I did this on my personal site in March; it was great!

Hi!
Speak infinity does not exist. The Internet is and there is an infinity of the information. Thanks.
Ritalin.

I love the new layouts.

Great job!

This is great! Love the new design and domain. Very nice!

I noticed a bug. The more menu link isn't shown on Google Blogs page.

Congratulations on the move Philipp. That must have been a tough decision to make. I'm diggen the simpleness of blog | forum. How many blogs of this scale can still remain this simple.

Nicely done, JP! Congrats on the new digs!

> The more menu link isn't shown
> on Google Blogs page.

Right, on that page the menu is supposed to be expanded... I fixed this now (so the more link won't show on that page)...

Wow, great stuff Philipp!
The new design reflects the overall quality of your blog.

> Looks like an encoding error for the apostrophe in
> the archive. See the last entry for June 1st:

Fixed now, thanks!

Love the layout.
The before and after blog post comments on one page is a brilliant idea.
On a 800*600 display (as on my Laptop) the right of the page is off the screen, which makes it look like the site's called "Google Blogo" but no other content is off the side, so I don't mind.
I think Comments should show the total (eg. 20 not 9+11)
When I first found the site when I was at school I typed in blogoscoped.com, now I'm going to keep typing in the old address, although as I'm at home I just click my bookmarks!

Good refresh! And particularly interesting topic about changing a domain name!

Good luck with the new version :-)

It retains the nice simple quality of the previous design, the navigation is an improvement, but it's a little bit too gray for my taste – it needs a couple more splashes of colour somehow.

Philipp,

The only thing I'd really suggest is that you make the blog link on the blog page (and likewise forum link on the forum page) unclickable. I thought it was an available link.

It's always a usability guide I've followed when designing websites.

Love the new look btw.

Wow, great new design. Congratulations on what I'm sure was a lot of work and stress. I'd love to hear more about what went into the new design and the work it took to put it together.

Hey,

Congrats Philipp! Nice design and an even nicer domain name!

I've been visiting your blog since you had the 1st gen design and all I can say is that your blog is much better than yesterday and hopefully not so good as it'll be tomorrow.

Cheers,

Here's my own experience changing my blog URL with an auto-forward option: I changed from libranlover.blogspot.com to blog.libranlover.net. Blogger continued to host my blog, I only changed the domain name. Blogger auto-forwards from the old URL to the new URL. The change in Google search results was almost imperceptible. For the first few days after I changed my URL, the old URL continued to appear in search results. Pretty quickly though, the new URL started to appear for the same keyword searches. I have not come across anything to suggest that I have gone down in search results or rankings.

Good luck with your new domain, auto-forwarding and page rank. I have updated my feed reader.

Nathan, the first try at a redesign a couple of months ago was universally hated so I quickly removed it – that failed one was based on a computer advertisement from the 70s I really loved. This time I didn't approach it from a layout point of view, but simply felt the need to clean up the blog, and also give the forum more weight, and make the design better represent what the blog and forum already is, and I figured the domain change is a good opportunity. I then played around with variants in Corel PhotoPaint. The first variant included the sidebar to the left side, but I don't really like navigation, and I love those simple sites that just let you read.

So then the current design was what I'd usually use as a first framework in Corel, but then I already liked the simplicity of it, and didn't add too much stuff to it after all. The logo is brighter than before because that contrasts well with the gray I think, or else it would be too little color (and there may still be too little color, I'll have to think about that...). I started out with the "80%" side-line in the side bar as text only, but then the lines were too strict, and I needed something to break the lines, so I added a 80% circle. But this reminded me too much of the web-2.0 circles that are too common now, and I then added the current "80%". This breaks the horizontal/ vertical-only lines and rectangles and also helps make the design look more fun, because it's on the edge of looking too serious I think.

After the design file was more or less done, I went over to implement this in the stylesheets, by copying certain parts from the image file and recreating other parts in pure CSS (for instance, the right gray bar was actually a very thick border in one stage of the CSS writing, which works too, though it's now an image). I have a sandbox.outer-court.com where I hooked this up to a mirrored database with samples so that I can test without affecting the rest of the site. Well, at that point I invited beta testers like Tony, Colin, Ionut and Ludwik and then worked with their feedback to continue the design.

blogoscoped.com/files/google-b ...

blogoscoped.com/files/blog-des ...

blogoscoped.com/files/contains ...

blogoscoped.com/files/blog-des ...

looks good, but where's the iphone version? hehe

Funny you ask aboyut the iPhone version, Ryan ... I was trying out an N800 internet tablet just as the new design went live. For an hour, I assumed that Philipp was sending a different style to mobile devices.

One small usability issue I've just noticed:

I used to be able to tell which Forum threads I'd already read because the colour of the link to the latest comment changed depending on whether the link was visited or not. That's not possible anymore. (If the colours are different, perhaps they're not sufficiently different.)

This is an essential feature for someone like me who reads every single thread and likes to just pickup where I left off...

BTW, the blog and forum is so much easier to read on my Nokia N73 because I don't have to scroll the screen right to avoid the menu all the time. I'm loving the new layout even more now!

Ooops. You're right Tony, I removed that in the CSS but this is a good reminder why it's important. I'll bring that back (and I'm also still thinking about the footer issue, because I agree something needs to say "end of page"... and ideally, it should be something useful too...).

Hi Philipp, Seeing as Blogoscoped is used a reference for Google information on many websites, maybe implementing a trackback system would be a good idea? It would be quite interesting to see just how many people link to Blogoscoped articles.

Congrats Philipp
The new design is pretty good.

So finally you were able to get the domain from so called brokers;)
You didn't hinted the amount though

There's one strange issue with this new design on my HP iPaq
the blog/forum entry is getting displayed one word per line.

example:
Tuesday,
July
3,
2007

New
Design
and
Move
to
Blogoscoped.com

There’s
a
little
surprise

the footer (This site unofficially covers Google™ and...) is showing properly

Not sure what the problem is but I'm sure you'll have a look at this
my resolution is 400x400 and browser is default IE of iPaq

Amazing!!

Congratulations Philipp Lenssen!! :)

Renê Fraga
GoogleDiscovery.com

Philipp also has googleblogoscoped.com/ , which redirects to this site.

Yes, I'm in the process of transferring that from Danny, who was nice enough to catch it for me :)

> maybe implementing a trackback system
> would be a good idea?

Does anyone know if Google's "Links to this post" feature is available for any site, not just Blogspot?

E.g. as shown here:
google-health-ads.blogspot.com ...

<< Does anyone know if Google's "Links to this post" feature is available for any site, not just Blogspot? >>

Since it's just based on the Google Blog Search link: operator, could you use Google’s client-side feed API, like you do on your new Chinese page?

I guess this is the feed you'd use (although you would obviously change the URL to make sure you only display links back to each individual post):

google.com/blogsearch_feeds?q= ...

Yeah, you're right!

Nice. I think google.blogoscoped.com is better, fit your blog title. blogoscoped.com can be used as a entrance for Blogs. For example, yahoo.blogoscoped.com, msn.blogoscoped.com ect. Or food.blogoscoped.com, fish.blogoscoped.com. For high-end blognetworks.

Nice new design, Philipp. Here's my two pence on some criticisms and potential improvements to the site...

** I think the "more >>" navigation will get on my nerves after a few visits to the site. I use the "Google's Blogs" link a lot (almost as much as the Forum), and just the fact that there's an extra click involved is slightly off-putting. Maybe you could do away with the more link, but give the "Blog" and "Forum" even more emphasis.

** It would be good to have a current-page navigation, so it's clearer which area you're on.

** I would use the orange RSS icon on the sidebar, instead of having the "Feed" link on the main navigation.

** You could also probably ditch the "Chinese" nav link, and just have it as a footnote in the sidebar – "Also available in Chinese".

** Add a label to the search bar "Search this site" – otherwise, it could just as easily be for searching the Web.

** Paginate the forum threads. Becoming slightly out-of-hand on the more popular topics.

... why does it say "Comments (9+55)" on the blog area?

Mambo, there were 9 posts regarding the redesign before this entry was posted, and the other 55 comments came afterwards. This functions the same way as how Philipp used to have the "Join the ongoing discussion" links in posts.

well.. after using the new layout a bit i have to take back my comment in the beginning, its really great. And you got a bit more.. well professional maybe.

great job.

<< Mambo, there were 9 posts regarding the redesign before this entry was posted, and the other 55 comments came afterwards. >>

Ahh... I see. Maybe that could be made a bit more obvious, then? Because I was trying to work that one out for a bit.

You get sent to a description of what that means when you click the "(9+55)" link ( blogoscoped.com/forum/101339.h ...). I don't know how it could be made apparent on the main page without adding a lot of text/clutter.

Great Job on all the hard work Philipp!

When you perform a search, was it intentional that the 'more' link acts like it was clicked so it shows all of the other navigation links?

The 'Top Members' page and 'show full rankings' page have the same behavior.

I agree a footer would be a good idea to add. Maybe add the blog and forum link to the bottom of the page too. This way after reading through a long page of posts/forum messages you could easily get back to either section more quickly.

I like it alot, it's not your average change for the sake of change, it's very well thought out.

There's a forum link hidden under the comment box at the bottom :)

> The 'Top Members' page and 'show full
> rankings' page have the same behavior.

Top Members shows the top 100 members. Full rankings shows the top 1000 members.

Martin, Sorry I was meaning to say it had the same behavior with the 'more' link not being displayed but showing all of the navigation links as if I had clicked the 'more' link.

I stated that about the search page and wanted to point out those 2 other pages had the same behavior.

Ah, I understand, sorry ><

fantastic color layout. one of the best designed blogs i've ever seen.

BUT

something to fix! there's a little too much space at the left above the links (which, though it draws the eye, sadly doesn't induce the reader to actually read the text and notice there's a forum – to do that, put a background color/button behind the two links 'blog' and 'forum')

Small update: now, every forum thread connected to a post will show the blogs linking to that post, inbetween the last comment and the submit form. You can see in this thread that this space is empty (at this moment), but in e.g. the following thread...

blogoscoped.com/forum/101183.h ...

... you will see a link to Valleywag below the last comment (all links are automatically polled via the Google blog search RSS/ the Google client-side RSS reader, as Tony suggested above):

So, it's basically like an automated trackback feature which is integrated into the comments. We'll see if those links will include many auto-created spam blogs in the future...

Pagination is needed in the forum/comments now. Blogoscoped is getting to the stage where pages are becoming very long. Especially threads such as this one where a lot of the replies are of a decent length (not just "Cool", for example).

That's pretty cool Philipp. You might want to consider adding rel="nofollow" to the links though.

> involved is slightly off-putting. Maybe you
> could do away with the more link, but give
> the "Blog" and "Forum" even more emphasis.

I'll certainly consider this over the coming days. I also click on the Google's Blogs link everyday, so I know what you mean.

As for an indicator where you're at (making the top links unlinked when you're already in the blog/ forum), I'll think about something... I agree it's a bit unclean to have something link to itself...

> Ahh... I see. Maybe that could be made a
> bit more obvious, then? Because I was trying
> to work that one out for a bit.

Yes, this is certainly slightly confusing. I mean the "ongoing comments" was also confusing, but I still hope to perhaps find a way to make it even more obvious than now.

Colin:
> When you perform a search, was it intentional
> that the 'more' link acts like it was clicked
> so it shows all of the other navigation links?

Hmmm. You're right, that's probably weird. The explanation of why that happens is that the search is also triggered from the Archive's tag cloud, and on the Archive page (like all other "more" links) the "more" menu is expanded...

> Pagination is needed in the forum/comments now.

There is something here which starts to collapses the middle of a thread when there over 100 comments. For instance, here:

blogoscoped.com/forum/26819.ht ...

But the 100 is not a fixed number, I can lower it if needed in the future...

Wow, I've never seen that. It's actually pretty cool way of doing it.

<< ... it's basically like an automated trackback feature which is integrated into the comments ... >>

Having it in the forum is exactly the right place to have it! It will be interesting to see how useful it is.

<< You might want to consider adding rel="nofollow" to the links though. >>

Not needed since they're written using JavaScript.

>>>> You might want to consider adding rel="nofollow" to the links though. >>
>>Not needed since they're written using JavaScript.

Suppose, didn't think about that (I was actually looking at the JS code when I made that comment aswell). I must be tired. :(

I agree with all the people above who recommend "google.blogoscoped.com". I don't know much about setting up domains, but since you own "blogoscoped.com", you can easily have "google.blogoscoped.com" redirect to "blogoscoped.com" right? I understand "google.blogoscoped.com" is too long, so a redirect would be perfect. It would also be nice for it to parallel "google.blogoscoped.cn".

FWIW, I don't think google.blogoscoped.com is necessary. Afterall, what would you put at www.blogoscoped.com? If anything, the Chinese version should change to blogoscoped.cn...

In Mozilla running in a window narrower than full screen the left side of the text is not accessible with the scroll bar. The scroll bar is there but can not go far enough to the left. You can access the text by widening the window.
Internet Explorer does not exhibit this.

I checked your old format from the google cache.
It has a similar problem, affecting the left sidebar.

Mozilla 1.6 on Windows xp

Fantastic!

How about with the “Comments (4+5)” have the 4 be a link to the top of the forum page without the #split perhaps?

Yes Victor, google.blogoscoped.com could be setup easy, as redirect to blogoscoped.com. Maybe in the future I will set that up...

This blog just lost a bit of personality. :-P
It's nice, it's just more ordinary and like "every" other quasi-modern site. Doesn't matter much, I'll just read it via Google Reader more often, I guess. :-)

> How about with the “Comments (4+5)”
> have the 4 be a link to the top of the forum
> page without the #split perhaps?

That would pretty much irritate me, I think. I've never paid any attentention to which part of a link I click on and If I had to start doing this I would quickly be put off.

Disclosure: I have not read all the comments, there are too many. Maybe this opinion has been already expressend.

I love the new color scheme, new logo and layout, but I would definitively put the grey bar, as well as the logo, at the left side of the page, rather than at the right one.

Clicking on the logo located at the top-right corner in order to go to the blog's homepage seems unnatural to me (opposod to clicking in the top-left corner).

Are there any other relevant websites which have a top-right based layout, rather than a top-left one? I can only think of top-left ones, such as Slashdot, Digg, etc.

> This blog just lost a bit of personality. :-P

Certainly food for thought (you're the second person to say something like this). Perhaps I can find a way to integrate some warmer colors somewhere, or something else which is a bit less elegant/ clean...

I'm proably a bit biased (most of my websites have navigation on the right). But I find that its easier for the user and I'm going to steal the excuse that phpBB gave for making the move to using the right side of a post for user details.

By putting the content first, it means the user focuses more on the content (you read left to right naturally).

I like the new design. It will take some time for me to re-educate myself to click in the links though (it was like an automatic process)

I only see your theme when I click through to make a forum post, and it looks like it's basically the same!

Looks great, congrats on the move and getting your domain.

Excellent! :D
Congratulations!

nice!!! :)

I'm late to the party--congrats! It's a very clean look; I really like the white bar crossing over the gray bar and the subtle shadow effect on the white bar.

COngrats Philipp, new design and new site, nice!!

Hi,
   The page blogoscoped.com/forum/101493.h ... breaks in opera 9.21, the text expands over the google ads.

Here is what mukthar is talking about:

farm2.static.flickr.com/1022/7 ...

Nice redesign; I like the new logo and features, although I too am a bit bothered by the movement of the grey bar from the left to the right. I know that it makes sense (you read left to right, etc), and it's probably partially that I haven't gotten used to the change yet, but I find that in general my eyes tend to naturally look slightly to right side of the screen.
Having the grey bar on the left provides a nice distinguishing mark between the desktop or screen edge and the start of your web page. Since people don't read On the right side, the scrollbar generally serves the function (with all due respect to any lefties out there who have moved their scrollbars to the left side of the screen)
As mentioned above, people read from left to right. So at a first glance, this site appears to be just text on a white background. It isn't until a second or two later that the eye reaches the right side and notices the logo and the grey bar. In fact, my first thought on loading this page today was "Is is css naked day?" (until I noticed the navigation on the right side, where of course it could not be without css unless you had changed to a tables layout). I notice this especially when I have scrolled down past the logo and ads (btw, I like the rounded look on those), all I see is black on white. Would it work to set the right hand stuff as "position:fixed" (even though IE6 doesn't support that part of the css standard) so that it shows no matter how far down the page you are?
Just my thoughts. I'm not necessarily proposing a complete return to the old positioning of the grey bar; but I think that just a little touch of color on the left hand side would greatly aid in recognition and give the site a bit more of what some would call "personality".

"19% Google free" is better.

Yes, the site is drab, and this is the first time I have been here.

Stick you own pictures on the side, it will:

- give life to the site
- make you a little more famous
- make you think twice about what you post. (since, there you are, looking at yourself).

Thanks Colin Colehour for the screenshot. This breaks in Internext Explorer also.
However, the "fit to width" button in opera makes the page render right, so there might be some workaround for this.

Where are the rest of the comments
I was waiting for the pagination & suddenly i see many of the comments are gone :(

Hey Philipp,

Good relaunch! I like the minimalistic approach, the design and the domain is more handy.. Great!

Keep it going.

Oliver

Rohit, The comments are still in the forum post, they are just hidden unless you want to see all of the comments. There is an 'Expand' link towards the top that allows you to see all of the comments on this post.

blogoscoped.com/forum/101339-f ...

Philipp, Is it possible to show a number of how many forum posts are hidden if you see the 'Expand' link?

Example:
Some posts have been collapsed. < link >Expand< /link > to see 40 more comments.

wa wa woo wa!

Borat likes the design

The new design is great. The forum and the comments feel very well integrated now. I like it very much. Congrats to Philipp, Tony and everyone else that made this happen.

Pssst: you should update the Blogoscoped entry on this page outer-court.com/

Nice shadow Effect. congrats Philip and others. "Grey" . when i validated your CSS using web developer tool . it shows this warning that occurs frequently.

Congratulations! No Error Found.
This document validates as CSS!

.postFooter a:visited You have no background-color set (or background-color is set to transparent) but you have set a color. Make sure that cascading of colors keeps the text reasonably legible.

I would change text color in Google Ads, because white text on light gray background is barely visible...

The expand comments link should be also made available below all the comments, in addition to above them.

I like it :-) – good work!

One bug. When you're posting a new thread, pressing tab when the focus is on the title field does take you to the Blog link instead of giving focust to the Full name field.

Now this thread has been collapsed, the "Above 9 comments were made in the forum before this was blogged, below comments were made afterwards." doesn't make as much sense because I can only see one comment above the split. Not sure how best to remedy that, other than a simple change of wording....

"9 comments were made in the forum before this was blogged, below comments were made afterwards."

I've fixed this thread now:

 blogoscoped.com/forum/101339.h ...

This used to happen in the old design too, and also happens on a lot of websites.

I guess since you're using a fixed width layout, you could set a width to the column and set text-overflow to hidden as the only time this is a problem is when people post long strings with no word break characters (like spaces or hyphens).

Thanks Tony. I've spotted another issue, well not so much issue as something that could be improved.

img175.imageshack.us/img175/22 ...

It looks great! I'm in Thailand so i have limited access to the internet. This was a very nice surprise :D I'm in some cafe with a few computers which don't have any permissions controls so i went ahead and installed firefox. The worst part was having to use IE to do it :P

The "collapse"/ "above comments" notes have now been improved to work together better...

I was so shocked about the new design, that I re-typed the url (to outer-court) by hand immediately only to discover, that it didn't help, the mirage was still there. I'm not sure what I should think about new design yet, but I can say that I got used to the old one very much, visiting this site on a daily routine.

I will be keeping an eye on your domain transition and it's side-effects, please report about them in a most detailed manner, because I'm in a similiar position, as I'll soon be replacing my old ugly domain www.jubi.buum.pl with a new one – www.zgodzinski.com