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

sorry if this thread is a duplicate

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

The "comments elsewhere" feature is now changed to a new format (credits to Martin + Tony!). You can see it at the end of this thread or also here:
http://blogoscoped.com/forum/101414.html#id101428

Nice redesign, but could use a little help. Having all the text aligned close to the left feels very awkward, as does having a huge blank gray bar on the right. The gray bar should be a vertically tilled gradient as the site looks boring if you are not at the top.. Text on the gray bar should have a higher visibility. Gray on gray hard to make out at a glance. Search should be more predominate. Do not like the collapsible links on the top. Makes the layout look sparse. You should put the same links on the bottom of all your pages as you do have on the top, because making your users scroll to the top to click a link is a bad navigation design. Comments from an experienced website designer.

I like the old design better. Sorry!

great design. nice job.

Thanks Colin & Philipp
Stupid me, I didn't saw that "expand" thing
BTW its a cool idea to collapse extra comments.

And as Colin said, if we can have a count at the expand link, it would be great

The design seems to leave a lot of empty page space on the sides of the page and around posts. Takes a lot of scrolling to read all the news.

This is very fancy.

Wow Great

Congrats everyone! Blogoscoped Rocks with new looks!

It might make sense to move the "Comments elsewhere" area below the comment form so you don't have to scroll through all of them like in this thread where there are many external links now:
http://blogoscoped.com/forum/101414.html#id101428

Also, how are you getting names for the comments elsewhere?

>> Takes a lot of scrolling to read all the news.

It's much easier to read short lines of text than really long ones though, so I think the scrolling isn't a problem.

the ads can be moved a bit right and comments elsewhere can be added

> Also, how are you getting names for
> the comments elsewhere?

It's the neat Google feed API + Google Blog search + some customization. For the names, Google offers an entry.author value, which I then connect to a special icons list (which is mainly a copy of the forum icons, but it also differs a bit). I posted some background info here yesterday:
http://groups.google.com/group/Google-AJAX-Search-API/browse_thread/thread/fa10a6a404ddc22d/467b8b40b080323b#467b8b40b080323b

Added to above description I made another change. Now the Atom feed is ordered by date, and expands to show dupes too, and then I filter out the dupes myself. Why? Because Google filtered out the wrong dupes, that is, they didn't show the original comment someone made when an automated blog copied that other comment.. even though the Google Blog Search already knows which was first (I alerted Google of this bug, or what you may call it). So now I order by date, reverse the list, and filter out copies manually.

Depending on how things go, I might restrict the "comments elsewhere" to English only (Tony told me you can simply append a lang parameter to the feed URL), though currently I kind of like to see those too...

Philipp
I like the way you have avoided login system for posting & replying
It actually makes it more usable

But can we have someway to edit post/comment
I know it might be difficult to avoid login, allow edit & maintain sanity.

But if we can have something like if the post/comment is made from a particular IP & has some particular cookie, then same name can edit it.

Its too much to ask but just an idea :)
  

Nice design. I think it's a definite improvement on the old design, although one suggestion I would have is to make use of the grey sidebar and put some more information and links in there. Archives? Categories?

I have to say "Comments elsewhere" are very annoying, especially where there is many of them. I think they should be hidden by default, similarly to "more >>"

That is – there should be link "Comments elsewhere (13)" that would show those links without refreshing page.

Editing would be nice feature, too. You could save special token in the cookie and allow people to edit their posts for limited period of time (10 minutes?). I make a lot of mistakes and I always notice them just after posting.

Ludwik

The information here is a gem!
  
[Signature URL removed – Tony]

Ludwik, the first thing I'll do to lower the "trackback noise" is to remove non-English blogs, I guess (as soon as I have access to a real computer somewhere!), because most of us won't understand anyway. I'll also consider collapsing comments the way you suggest (or moving them below the comment box)...

> moving them below the comment box

That's actually a pretty neat idea.
That make sense. Those are not items you reply to, so they shouldn't be above text box. And below there still visible, but don't annoy you.

> remove non-English blogs

I understand your reasons, but I have to say – it was very interesting for me to find today (with this feature) a post on Polish blog about your note about the gay parade. I even commented there.

i have every time same error
max size 25 kb...

[Spam removed – Tony]

The above post is obviously a SPAM (http://www.google.com/search?q=%22%D0%9E%D1%87%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%8C+%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B9+%D1%81%D0%B0%D0%B9%D1%82%2C+%D1%85%D0%BE%D1%82%D1%8F+%D0%B8+%D0%BD%D0%B5+%D1%85%D0%B2%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%B5%D1%82+%D0%BF%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%BE%D1%87%D0%BA%D0%B8+%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B7%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B2.+%D0%9D%D0%BE+%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B7%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BB%22&btnG=Search). Rather strange, though, because it doesn't include any links. Anyway, I'm pretty shocked, because I don't speak Russian... at all, but still I can understand above SPAM very well. What does it mean? :>

I don't speak Russian also but i think it's spam just like Ludwik said. Any Russians in the house? ;)

I haven't made my post clear...
I know that this is SPAM, because of Google results for this text. And I understand what this text means. It goes like this – "Good Morning! Interesting site's name – blogoscoped.com, how have you managed to got such a nice domain name? " and so on...

My question wasn't about what this text means, but what means the fact that I don't speak Russian, and usually don't understand Russian texts, but still I understand some random Russian spam (I made the above translation without any dictionary or automatic translator...).

Philipp,

Has this new design been tested for usability for users with "color blindness" ?

Pd, I try to make sure to use e.g. underlines, not just colors for links (unless the link isn't differentiated at all). If there's more to think of it would be interesting to know...

What about the totally blind? ;-)

> What about the totally blind?

Actually yes, I optimized the underlying HTML for text-to-screen readers. For instance, I'm putting the navigation below the content so you don't have to get through it when you want the content. This is also good for mobile phones. Using CSS, you can separate the "content direction" from the visuals. And let's not forget the Googlebot also doesn't render visuals!

Philipp, recently I was "turned on" in this area ..

http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/complete.html

and this got me thinking actually what % of Google's pages are designed to accommodate the W3 guidelines or for that matter of fact any website (.. and off course you redesigned your pages too!! :)-

Current research indicates that less then 2% of overall sites can sustain usability for special needs person. I found this to be stat's to be really intriguing... when there's 7-10% of "Red-green" effect within the whole world's population. This means sites that are can't be used by over (mean value) 8.5% of the world's internet users.

Not sure the figures on the internet users from PEW..but if one has that it becomes a simple maths .. of how many users one negates from visiting a site – based on usability criteria.

  

I was actually joking, but cool!

pd

There's always the Google Accessible Search for visually impaired peole:
http://labs.google.com/accessible/

Btw, was this always powered by Google CSE?

martin

Thanks for the linky. never know that existed ..and no, I don think this was part of CSE. Maybe someone (From google) can clarify when flavour of the SE, found its way into CSE!!

Google Accessible Search is only useful for finding accessible web pages and is powered by Google Co-op / Custom Search (though I don't really understand in what way).

http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=000183394137052953072%3Azc1orsc6mbq