news site?

[webwit]

This is the new hot design.
http://interactive.guim.co.uk/embed/201 ... index.html
It reminds me of magazines about design. It looks great. Somehow don't read a single sentence.

[DerpyDash_xAD]

If you want something to stay at the top of the page, use position: fixed. A lot of sites hack around it with JavaScript by making an object attach itself to the top of the window as you scroll down, and this retarded slidy thing tends to jolt when they miscalculate the number of pixels remaining at the top of the window. Just make it stop. Infinite scrolling on serious sites can die in a fire too -- Google Images does that and that jolts so hard when it loads the next batch of images that you lose your place completely.

So much fail.

Thanks for the input on position:fixed thing, but in regards to infinite scrolling, I suggested a method for providing a very large amount of overhead in my post.

edit: I think half the issue is most sites try to load only once at the bottom, with no preloading.

[Muirium]

My #DEITY, how I loathe those sites which break the document model, like Medium. I have to read them via Instapaper or Safari Reader instead. Don't those guys realise that it's my eyes, not theirs, that are visiting the damn page? (Answer: no, duh.) I like to scroll whenever I want and for things not to go to shit! That whole thing they're doing is just as evil as the image javascript shenanigans we bemoaned before. Keep magazine style control freakery for your apps, please gentlemen, this is the web!

[002]

This is the new hot design.
http://interactive.guim.co.uk/embed/201 ... index.html
It reminds me of magazines about design. It looks great. Somehow don't read a single sentence.

Seems to function similar to Eyty's shoe website. 90s overload at the top

[webwit]

Bootstrap. For the uninitiated:
http://expo.getbootstrap.com/
It's very hip, it's very mobile.

[Muirium]

It's something else, too.

[matt3o]

you guys are picky

ps: I was kidding about monospace

[Halvar]

Mu, I don't follow. How does Bootstrap stink? Design? Usability? Compatibility?

Looks pretty good to me, what am I missing?

[DerpyDash_xAD]

you guys are picky

ps: I was kidding about monospace

Oh well, we all have our loves, and like I said, I have no skill in design of any kind.

But please, feedback on the technical aspects?

[scottc]

So fresh.
So hipster.

[Halvar]

Depends on what you use it for I guess. If you look a a page like this:

http://getbootstrap.com/getting-started/

It's just a mobile-centric framework (although the navigation on the right isn't even that touch friendly in this case)

[matt3o]

The problem with wordpress is not the design (there are some boilerplate themes) but the code. It really, really stinks.

Considering that it seems to be some interest in this thing I'll try to post my ideas today. We need a name!

Design guidelines:

- keep it simple stupid (KISS)
- if the news is short, no "read more" just "permalink"
- nice and simple design (with some subtle "monospace" accents maybe)
- Javascript serves to a purpose, it is not the purpose
- images should be hosted, going back and forth from the site to the wiki or to imgur is cumbersome. Ideally you drag-n-drop the images onto the page, add the tilte, write the text. That's it.
- "suggest a news" for casual readers that are not editors (that's why we need user roles, but could be handled with simple emails initially)
- do not spy on users. no google anal-ytics. no required email to login (if we have a login). no share links with counters (that's a ping to google/facebook/twitter/...), and so on

These are the first things that come to my mind. I'll post something later today.

@DerpyDash_xAD, keep the suggestions coming!

[Muirium]

Mu, I don't follow. How does Bootstrap stink? Design? Usability? Compatibility?

Looks pretty good to me, what am I missing?

It's ingeniously wrong in all of those dimensions.

Try running it on older hardware. The Javascript chokes — breaking the simplest of all things: scrolling — and you'll often just crash the browser on an older tablet. Everyone writes JS for the current interpreters, but even 4 or 5 year old kit these days is running older runtimes, without the optimisations, and really will be 10-50 times slower than current hardware. It's just horrible, considering we're talking about scrolling through *text*!

Accessibility affects a lot of people. I do most my long form reading at night. I'm photosensitive and strongly prefer white text on a black background (with the screen brightness at minimum too). This is fine on most sites with a simple bookmarklet. I often even just run my system in inverse colour mode (which is horribly broken on Windows, a friend has shown me, but on Mac and iOS just flips every pixel's colours, system wide as it should). These sites respond poorly to either approach. The images are always showing through, and I can't control those as easily. I resort to stopping them of formatting entirely, via Instapaper etc. At that point, I might as well be reading email instead of a website!

And finally, what bugs me about any floating contents — moving site branding, ads or parallax backgrounds — is that it's a trick, trying and succeeding to draw my eyes away from the text. If it were something I could just turn off, I'd go ahead and do that. But whenever I see it, I know to expect zero customisation tools for my needs, because these themes are always a strong indicator of a fuck off attitude from the site's designers. I raise my hackles like when some douchebag shows up in a car blaring gangsta music. No good ever comes from this!

So yes, half and half between objective and subjective. But why bother when we're trying to showcase accessible, traditional, community content? It's not like we're a high design site in desperate need of conveying our "edge".

[DerpyDash_xAD]

I do most my long form reading at night. I'm photosensitive and strongly prefer white text on a black background (with the screen brightness at minimum too).

Thats EXACTLY why I suggested a dark/light switcher, white backgrounds are so painful at night, I can't stand it - and I'm definitely less sensitive than you - I'm only slightly more sensitive than your average blue eyed person.

[Muirium]

My eyes are every kind of crazy, which is why I notice these things. Keeping things simple is the best way to let users with accessibility needs like me take control for ourselves. A computer screen is a powerful thing indeed for someone with sensitivity like me (I could never read white paper books at night) but JavaScript is my constant nemesis, trying to seize control away and slam me with brightness at every turn. Fie! Fie!

[DerpyDash_xAD]

My eyes are every kind of crazy, which is why I notice these things. Keeping things simple is the best way to let users with accessibility needs like me take control for ourselves. A computer screen is a powerful thing indeed for someone with sensitivity like me (I could never read white paper books at night) but JavaScript is my constant nemesis, trying to seize control away and slam me with brightness at every turn. Fie! Fie!

With books, all you need is the right light source - I've always found fires/lighters produce a comfortable level/hue of light.

[Muirium]

I tried, back in the old days. What I actually get is after images of everything I look at, which are way more obnoxious in low / night light. (Occular albinism.) You know what it's like when you get after images of the sun in your eyes, in daylight, right? I get that same image persistence at a much lower brightness level, and it lasts for many seconds. So if I read against white, even when really dimly lit, I get loads of additive after image layers on top of one another, making it extremely difficult to read the dark characters I'm actually looking for! They're swamped.

Light text works a hell of a lot better for me. Then I can simply read the brightest line. Wish I had this stuff back when I wasn't ever doing my homework at school!

Obviously, my problem's pretty rare. But all the visual issues people have add up until you're really alienating a lot of users by trapping them in a fancy pants dynamic layout.

[matt3o]

I actually can't read very long text (say more than an couple of pages) on screen. black background is easier to the eye but the characters are less readable. white background is very fatiguing on the long distance. that's the reason why I bought myself an e-ink ereader and I don't read books on the ipad.

[DerpyDash_xAD]

I tried, back in the old days. What I actually get is after images of everything I look at, which are way more obnoxious in low / night light. (Occular albinism.) You know what it's like when you get after images of the sun in your eyes, in daylight, right? I get that same image persistence at a much lower brightness level, and it lasts for many seconds. So if I read against white, even when really dimly lit, I get loads of additive after image layers on top of one another, making it extremely difficult to read the dark characters I'm actually looking for! They're swamped.

Light text works a hell of a lot better for me. Then I can simply read the brightest line. Wish I had this stuff back when I wasn't ever doing my homework at school!

Obviously, my problem's pretty rare. But all the visual issues people have add up until you're really alienating a lot of users by trapping them in a fancy pants dynamic layout.

That must be rough - at least for me, if I wait a while, my eyes adjust - but at school, a few times I had to have friends guide me, because it was simply too painful for me to keep my eyes open.

[Muirium]

I'm a quick reader. But only average, really, as I'm always taking breaks. Similar kind of thing, perhaps, as keeps me out of RSI when typing.

[matt3o]

finally found the perfect theme

screen.png (51.39 KiB) Viewed 3239 times

of course I'm not suggesting to use this layout, but it's the most basic/starter wordpress theme I've found. we can build from here.

[Halvar]

@Muirium: thanks, now I understand. I tried those Bootstrap sites with Javascript turned off, and in fact they degraded quite nicely. But I only tried it in my current browsers. It's probably dependent on the CSS that the browser supports.

@webwit: that looks like the CSS file could not be loaded... The pure WWW as Tim Berners-Lee imagined it... This would mean you'd have to start CSS from scratch. I don't know -- are the existing skins really that bad?

[DerpyDash_xAD]

@Muirium: thanks, now I understand. I tried those Bootstrap sites with Javascript turned off, and in fact they degraded quite nicely. But I only tried it in my current browsers. It's probably dependent on the CSS that the browser supports.

@webwit: that looks like the CSS file could not be loaded... The pure WWW as Tim Berners-Lee imagined it... This would mean you'd have to start CSS from scratch. I don't know -- are the existing skins really that bad?

Better than Gopher: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29

[matt3o]

webwit?! seriously?!

[ne0phyte]

webwit?! seriously?!

Huh? Did I miss anything?

EDIT: Ahh nevermind. I thought some post got deleted or something. Yeah that design is horrible.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

webwit?! seriously?!

I very much doubt it …

What's funny about that site is how immaculately executed it is, with not even the tiniest jolt between the scrolling transitions. It's tragic how much time people will waste on something so spectacularly useless.

[Muirium]

To be fair, it's a great design for "showcasing" content that I don't give a toss about; like Webwit's example. You flick through the whole thing — which feels better on a multitouch trackpad than on a touchscreen — looking for the seams, ignoring the pantomime wall of words cascading like the scenery in a popup book. I'm sure every newspaper website needs this thing, bad. But wherever do the ads go?

[DerpyDash_xAD]

But wherever do the ads go?

Screw capitalism.

[Muirium]

In capitalist Russia, capitalism screw YOU!

Obviously ads are not a problem for our news section. But you have to wonder where the cool ad-free yet still commercial sites are getting their money from. Well, I did, until I read this:

Advertising, or the promise of advertising, is the economic foundation of the world wide web.

Let me talk about that second formulation a little bit, because we don't pay enough attention to it. It sounds like advertising, but it's really something different that doesn't have a proper name yet. So I'm going to call it "Investor Storytime"…

Investor storytime is when someone pays you to tell them how rich they'll get when you finally put ads on your site.

Pinterest is a site that runs on investor storytime. Most startups run on investor storytime.

Investor storytime is not exactly advertising, but it is related to advertising. Think of it as an advertising future, or perhaps the world's most targeted ad.

Both business models involve persuasion. In one of them, you're asking millions of listeners to hand over a little bit of money. In the other, you're persuading one or two listeners to hand over millions of money.

http://idlewords.com/bt14.htm

Well worth the epic read! I can't even think of a good way to sum it all up.

[matt3o]

now I want an investor!