My own icon? Really?! :) That's neato.

The design is clean and cool. I like the muted color scheme. I'm glad you moved all of those ugly buttons to the bottom of the page, but I would favor doing away with them completely. Personally, I don't like buttons interfering with my design.

It fits snuggly at 800x600 which is nice.

A skip to content link would be good for accessibility.

Those trackbacks on the left, what entries are they referencing? TrackBacks are great, but if they have no context, what's the point?

Comment permalinks would be nice.

-Posted by Joshua Kaufman on January 31, 2003 11:50 AM

Hopefully you aren't one of those designers that asks for comments and then takes it as a personal affront if someone doesn't love it (I deal with that ALL the time here at work). If you aren't prepared for some brutal honesty from a lone voice, don't read on...

To be honest, I like the current design better. First thing is that all the extra stuff is on the right, where I naturally do not read first. Keep in mind that these thoughts stem from the fact that I only read 3-4 blogs daily, and don't have time/interest to see who is linking to what. I like this blog because posts are short and focused. Perhaps this would be a good place for a cookied minimize button or something?

Also, the first time I saw the yellow thing at the top of the redesign I was thinking "cool, daring, I like it". The second time I was thinking, "weird, too big, I don't like it".

Colorwise, have to given any thought to user-defined colors? I really like that feature (and how easy it is to use) on camworld (the site I originally came here from I think).

The new functionality sounds good though. I'm a big fan of monkeys (who isn't) if you are looking for icon ideas :)

-Posted by Eric on January 31, 2003 12:34 PM

Eric, I've had a situation before where I had to fly to another city to explain to a CEO why the UI I produced for his company was so bad and how I was going to fix it. That helped me grow a thick skin on UI reviews ;)

Re: the left vs right content issue, I have always made the point that daily content pages should have their 'junk' on the right so that the new content that the user is here to read is at the top left. I used to run a site called vrabbits.com with a bunch of friends, and for a redesign we did, I made that argument, and won. It's a good point, and perhaps a left/right swap will work here.

For the top color swatch, I like that part :) And I won't be doing user defined colors, for a simple reason, I'm lazy, and my site is an expression of my sensibilities. If you want it your way (the rhetorical 'you', not you in particular Eric) you can grab my RSS feed that contains all of the content I create and present it however you want.

Josh...

Those track backs will reference nothing other than the blogs they are from. The reference is that bloggers who tend to have similar interests and post similar articles can put their junk on this site if they want.

Also, you prolly could use the custom icon as that, but i wrote it to offer up a selection to you. But, now that I think about it, you could hack that pretty easily from the client side, but you icon would always show up as a 40x40 pixel image (and, the image wouldn't be saved in the cookie, because I'm reading a value from a location that you can't edit). All of the javascript will be available when it goes live, you'll see what I mean.

Thanks for the comments guys.

-Posted by dan on January 31, 2003 02:58 PM

Hmm... just a few quick comments...
yes, move the left column to the right side as noted... but put categories and elsewhere up top, along with a search box and your open external links checkbox... that way they're on the same consistant position on every page, and the location is not dependent on how many people ping.

Is the "postings from other websites and blogs" section similar to lazyweb rather than people who have done a trackback to your specific post?

Oh... and the one click searching thing... that's kind of annoying.
If you're going to do something like that, maybe you should use some DHTML and create a search form that matches the rest of the site (small layer pops open in middle of page with a drop shadow or something, color matches site and so on, search box in it, layer closes on search submission). I've always preferred just having a search box right there so I can type and go without having to hunt for one.

The big thing in the upper left corner doesn't do much for me, but I'm surfing at 2304*864 so it's not taking up an obscene amount of screen real estate.
Not that you probably care, but it works OK in NN 4.7 (at least, it doesn't look as bad as mine does with everything overlapping everything.)

I wonder if it might be worthwhile (or even possible) to combine comments and trackback... if someone does a trackback on your post to display it in line in the comments, as if it were also a comment, which, in a way, it is.

Oh, and the open external links in new windows gives a javascript error, but presumably you know about that already. :-)

-Posted by jc on January 31, 2003 03:52 PM

- keep sidebar on the right (for all the reasons already mentioned)

- lose the yellow blob in the upper left-hand corner. any initial 'nice' reactions will soon wear off. it's not too attractive, adds no value, and it distracting. keep it simple.

-Posted by jruselll on January 31, 2003 04:29 PM

jc said: "I wonder if it might be worthwhile (or even possible) to combine comments and trackback... if someone does a trackback on your post to display it in line in the comments, as if it were also a comment, which, in a way, it is."

I agree, trackbacks are comments and should be displayed as such. Dan, I've got an unreleased plugin that combines TrackBacks and comments. If you want to try it, let me know.

-Posted by Adam Kalsey on February 2, 2003 04:49 AM