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The new Gawker / Kotaku / Gizmodo layout is terrible


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<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml">

From the header of the source. Facebook Platform. I think that explains it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that used by a gazillion websites to enable "liking" of articles and other crap?

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Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that used by a gazillion websites to enable "liking" of articles and other crap?

I've never seen it before *shrug* I followed my nose and found out what it was. The like stuff is part of it, btu it's also for easy feeds into Facebook, as well. Given the massive integration push with FB lately, I'm willing to bet part of the new layout is further optimization for it. I did notice however that I can't block Facebook in NoScript on Gawker sites anymore like I could before the redesign. It doesn't seem to appear. Take that as you will.

Seems to me that after all the push to move away from optimizing for IE has turned towards optimizing for FB and iDevices. Not sure that's any better.

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Just put

#!classic

at the end or the url.

I've got that set. It doesn't make it any better, especially when every time I go there, with that flag on, newest stories from the last couple of hours may or may not be there. Sometimes they'll show up, I glance em over, leave, come back and they're gone again. Then I come back sometime later and they're back, but the latest are now not there. Not to mention the comment options in user settings are broken. When I tick "Oldest first" and choose "Expand All Replies", those options had better work or there's no point in having them.

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The old layout had lots of nice graphics, almost every article had a full-width photo or graphic at the top and on the main page, the top bar had images representing their top articles, the titles were easy to read and so it was easy to scroll through quickly to see what the day's stories were.

Now it seems extremely white space and text heavy. Article images are small and stuck in the sidebar. To see the day's articles you have to click in the sidebar and scroll down. Even the Classic mode seems to have much smaller images and much more whitespace. The old column width was just perfect, it's generally easier to read in smaller columns than in big spread out pages.

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I'm actually getting used to the classic view on the new site. My only problem is that the site is slow or won't load properly. Assume that will change in a few days after they have worked the kinks out.

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The new look ok but it needs some fixing. Oddly enough it seems work just fine on lifehacker.com so why can't they just copy and paste. LOL. In both "classic" and new format work just fine there. Actually functional.

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In their introductory post they say it's so that they can put what's important right there in front of you. What I used to like is being able to scroll through and pick out what was important to me. I used to be a regular Gizmodo/Kotaku/Jalopnik/io9 reader but I think I'm switching to Engadget/Joystiq/Autoblog and I guess I'll find a replacement for io9.

What about fleshbot?

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absolutely horrendous design. seems they tried to go for a twitter type 2 pane layout, and they just failed miserably.

This layout is so bad, so poorly designed, to hard so navigate and actually read, there's a good chance I wont even both visiting some of these sites anymore.

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Breaking the Web with hash-bangs

Tuesday, February 08, 2011

Lifehacker, along with every other Gawker property, experienced a lengthy site-outage on Monday over a misbehaving piece of JavaScript. Gawker sites were reduced to being an empty homepage layout with zero content, functionality, ads, or even legal disclaimer wording. Every visitor coming through via Google bounced right back out, because all the content was missing.

JavaScript dependent URLs

Gawker, like Twitter before it, built their new site to be totally dependent on JavaScript, even down to the page URLs. The JavaScript failed to load, so no content appeared, and every URL on the page was broken. In terms of site brittleness, Gawker?s new implementation got turned up to 11.

Every URL on Lifehacker is now looks like this http://lifehacker.com/#!5753509/hello-world-this-is-the-new-lifehacker. Before Monday the URL was almost the same, but without the #!. So what?

Fragment identifiers

The # is a special character in a URL, it marks the rest of the URL as a fragment identifier, so everything after it refers to an HTML element id, or a named anchor in the current page. The current page here being the LifeHacker homepage.

So Sunday Lifehacker was a 1 million page site, today it's a one page site with 1 million fragment identifiers.

Why? I don't know. Twitter's response when faced with this question on launching "New Twitter" is that Google can index individual tweets. True, but they could do that in the previous proper URL structure before too, with much less overhead.

More

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What a disaster. I use the Readability plugin in Firefox on it now if I want to read one article.

Thanks for the heads up, but what settings are you using, or do you have any other tips? Because using "Readability" isn't really giving me a great experience :no:

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