Five Years Old

Congratulations! On the “new look”, it’s been flicking in and out for a few days, has it not? I though it was an error at first but I guess not. It’s getting slowly better, though, and hopefully will be smooth and happy soon. At first I thought you’d deleted Matthew Yglesias from the blog roll but now I see you’ve just moved him (and some others) around. Don’t forget he’s moving to a new URL soon.

where’s the thingy for going to previous and post posts? It was sometimes useful.

I wondered why you didn’t celebrate on the day, but this must be the answer. Having the main posts on the left is a Good Thingâ„¢.

I’m not quite sure if it is a good or a bad thing that the categories and tags have left the stage. The big risk is that a blog gets too many silly categories so perhaps a clean-up was due.

Same as #4 – the page is too wide and huge font size in firefox.

ff2/pc

I’m using Firefox on a mac and everything seems to be working properly. Congrats on the new layout, but to be nitpicky I’ll point out that I liked the way the blog was in the center of the page (rather than on the left) in the old layout.
Also, my wishlist for changes would include some sort of interface for the seminars/book events. Maybe if we were confronted with some sort of index, rather than an unordered series of blog entries, they would be much more accessible. A great example is Quiggin’s index of “The Republican War on Science”.

I’m using FF3 on Linux, but I’ve just noticed that the problem only appears when I have a minimum font size set. I think this is an outcome of the stupid font-sizing hack I mentioned in my previous comment – the layout is specified in terms of base units of a very small font; if your browser won’t let the font size get that small, the layout ends up too wide. Unfortunately, this initial idiocy ramifies throughout the whole theme, so I suspect it’s a not so eady to fix (I’m a bit depressed to see that a theme which is as fundamentally flawed as this one can be sold for a really fairly significant amount of money).

Nice clean look, and I’m using Opera for the Mac. Congratulations on the anniversary!

Hey, it even remembers me, like an old bartender would! Sad to see Ted Barlow slip off the masthead — he was like a guy with a show on the DuMont network, I guess.

Font size is OK, I need my glasses for everything these days (stupid reading).

Whoever came up with the idea of printing quotations and draft comments in grey? Some eagle eyed, eagle-brained 20-year-old no doubt. Read up on what happens to visual acuity when you age. Please go back to a colour contrast.
I agree with others on the waste of scarce screen real estate.

Looks good to me, but since I’m also in Tucson, it might only be proximity.

I’m also using Firefox 3 and also have the problem described above — your page layout is too wide for my browser. If I disable the minimum font size option, it becomes too narrow — now there are big ugly black bands down both sides of the page.

(Also, I’d like to second the call for comment previews.)

Ross Smith – I like the black bands!

We do seem to be in sync in a weird way. I started my blog 5 years ago, a few weeks before you guys — then I redesigned the site recently as well. (I used to redesign every six months or so, but this time it had been years.)

Of course, we’re also out of sync in the sense that The Weblog is not being named one of the world’s most influential blogs, etc. — though if it was, I would fear the direction the world was taking.

Seems fine to me in Safari 3.1.2., Max OSX 10.5.4.

I would like the masthead to be clickable as a way back to the home page, though.

voyou seems to misunderstand the function of the 62.5% font-sizing style — it’s actually meant to establish a standard baseline, so that individual sections of the design, such as the primary content area and the navbar — can be set in simple increments of a theoretical 10px base font size. So, if you set your body copy font size to 1.6em, you can be pretty sure it’s going to render in most browsers at 16px in height.

Nick, I think I do understand the 62.5% thing – the problem is that it’s stupid. 62.5% might be 10px, but it might well not be; when it isn’t, the design is likely not to work. It’s particularly likely not to work well when you do things like the current theme here does, such as setting the width to 100em, on the assumption that that will be 1000px wide, and so a reasonable size.

So, if you set your body copy font size to 1.6em, you can be pretty sure it’s going to render in most browsers at 16px in height.

This reveals the central mistake underlying this 62.5% nonsense: it’s an attempt to lay out a web page in terms of pixel dimensions, without actually specifying pixel dimensions. This is just a fundamentally misconceived project: it encourages CSS authors to think of their web pages in terms of pixels, which would be a mistake even if it worked (because, how is the author supposed to know what pixel text size and width will look good to me?), while implementing that in a way that doesn’t even work.

There’s a perfectly adequate standard baseline already: 1em and 100% font size. If you design in terms of that, your page is much more likely to work for different users.

Congratulations, and well, thanks for the 5yrs.

I’m not sure I like the new layout either but that’s just probably aversion to change.

Congrats. Main column (LH) seems a bit narrow. Given the usual length of posts, maybe you could use two column format (you’re in WordPress now, right)?

Anyway, here’s to another decade or so of excellence: CT’s the best blog in the world, hands down (with apologies to any pals I may offend with that appellation).

Where do I apply to join the “back to the old format” club? Same reason – being a natural-born reactionary.

Five years old? N00bs!

On the theme, I don’t like the column layout or the black vertical edges, but than what do I know?

Have you abandoned your archive?

Another vote for preview.

Happy anniversary, and please do move to two columns instead of three. Given the (pleasant) length of most CT post-and-comment threads, we end up with a narrow strip of text teetering on the left-hand bank of a Mississippi-wide river of blank.

(And another vote for previews, of course.)

I liked it better before you changed it. I don’t like all the clutter at the top of the page.

Just looking over this page again now, and have a suggestion that may or may not be heeded – how about not having the Lumber Room in its entirety (just a link) on the comments pages, with the same going for the list of contributors?

At the moment, the layout squashes the comments into a half-page space; this seems a little unnecessary seeing as the whole purpose of this page is for comments and reader opinion.

I like the new format, and I don’t see any problems with Firefox 3, neither on OS X nor Windows XP.

Oh, and thanks for fixing the horrid pale grey citations (my grouch in #20) already. The left-hand bar does the job just fine.

Blast, the central quartet of carets “^^^^” disappeared. Bring back preview.

Also congratulations, also looks good. Glad you’re numbering the comments!

Wish list: previous/next post; illustration also links to homepage; some way to access the old wood.

I rather liked the categories and tags, though Lawyers Guns & Money is the champion of the artful tag set.

Am also ruminating on the differences between “publish” and “submit.”

Can you please please please bring back the links to previous post and next post? It’s so much easier to go to a live bookmark for the oldest post I haven’t read, and then just use “next post” to scroll through to each new post, rather than going to the home page, expanding links for ones that are continued “below the fold”, and reading things in reverse temporal order.

I think that’s my biggest pet peeve about any sort of blog layout. Maybe there are better ways to read blogs where the next and previous post buttons aren’t quite as important?

I’m going to add myself to the list of folks requesting the previous and next post links.

Thanks for all the work on this, Kieran!