A few days ago, Nick (a volunteer admin at the http://www.chessdiscussion.com/ forums) approached me about the layouts of my chess blogs. The previous layout of this blog was done a while back and it is not really so efficient with so much wasted space. Therefore, I decided to give it my amateur shot to “enhance” it. I personally find this layout a little easier to read and follow. I am not done yet as I am still playing with various features. But I hope you like the new format as well.
Chess Daily News from Susan Polgar
Very nice! Much cleaner. (And I was getting tired of the kittens.)
Isn’t it great when someone fixes something instead of just complaining about it?
I definitely have to get used to the new layout.
At the moment I miss the old one but in a month I am sure I can’t remember how the old one looked like. 🙂
But I have to admit I do not know why this one should be better than the old one… but it isn’t worse, too, so who cares as long as its contests stay as good and diversified as they always were.
Keep up the work, please, no matter how it looks.
Best wishes from Germany
Jochen
Have you ever considered migrating to WordPress? (www.wordpress.com)
I find it a lot better and professional in comparison to blogspot.
Oh! The other one looked so much nicer graphically!
But all is OK with me! 🙂
Looks good, but you definitely need your “comments” link to stand out from all the other links.
You may also want to consider a little margin on each side of the page to give your text a little padding.
[1] Gone is the important list of recent threads/topics. The titles in this list were handy clickable links.
Now I have to tediously scroll to see the recent thread titles.
[2] Needs bigger margins.
[3] This so-called blog has always desparately needed front page information about the date-time of the latest comment per thread. Having to enter each thread to find out whether further comments have been made continues to be absurd.
I wonder whether WordPress provides that date-time info?
[4] Beyond formatting; this site uses blog technology, but it does not fit my understanding of what a blog is. Instead this is more like a newswire. I am not saying a newswire is better or worse; tho more true blog entries would be desirable.
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I miss the kittens!
It is surprising that later today you moved the only advertisement I have ever seen on this blog down so far that it can be seen only by scrolling down.
“1 rule of flat stomach” — in World Clocks.
I think they mean flat ‘tummy’ or ‘belly’.
That is not my ad. That is Google ad which came automatically when I use the clocks and date feature.
I am working on finding a way to fix that.
Best wishes,
Susan Polgar
I thought the old layout was nicer-looking, but probably that’s because I have yet to get used to this one. Anyway, this blog is awesome no matter what it looks like. 🙂
Your new layout is good, but it’s hard to match the look and feel of your original blog. That was exceptional, imho. Made reading the current content as well as finding the archives easy. The backdrop was also superb.
The key is content though, and you are great at it!
Please go back to the old layout. This one’s worse.
It’s also much slower to respond.
Sorry,
preferred the older layout.
regards
Steve Carroll
I don’t notice a difference in response time (as of Wed. 8/27 8pm ET)—though I have cable-modem broadband. Overall I like the new layout better.
Besides crisper lines, the main positive effect I sense is the larger type size. In fact, it seemed to get even slightly bigger yesterday or today compared to Monday, though perhaps making the background grayer caused the effect by upping the contrast. Definitely the background should be off-white rather than stark-white, though I would make it somewhat creamier and less gray. I’m qualified to make such judgments, because we made exactly the same decision with floor and wall tiles while remodeling our upstairs bathroom last winter!
The only minus is that I like the main-blog-item band to be centered rather than left-adjusted. But then the extra margin would force a smaller type size or would lengthen the already-considerable vertical space. A right-adjustment is the other idea, and it might make the photos seem more centered. The two blogs in my field that I frequent most, Computational Complexity and Shtetl-Optimized, exemplify right-adjust (with a famously bland layout) and margins to give a “centering” effect, respectively.
Hi. I notice a technical problem with the new layout: After entering the page, or a sub-page (article), some kind of function is repeatedly performed in short intervals, related to an (empty?) page called rpc_relay.html, causing net activitiy. I saw it causes upstream, not downstream. I need to hit the browser’s stop button twice, to stop that.
I am not sure but I think it could be related to your World Clocks element, which is constantly changing size during that activity, kind of “blinking”.
I am aware that it can depend on the individual configuration, but I use a fairly normal configuration with MSIE 7 and Vista, and a 1024*768 resolution.
As for the layout itself, I think it’s ok but I would prefer a slightly smaller font. Also, WordPress is a good tip IMO.
Thanks for your efforts and for the many chess news and puzzles.
Hi again. I’ve just noticed that the World Clocks element is gone, and the effect I have described above is also gone.