After many long hours of work with Zohair Yousafi and the rest of the WordPress team, we’re launching the first significant redesign of the site since 2018.
For those on desktops, laptops, and tablets, the front page is divided into several sections:
- Latest: The five most recent substantive posts.
- Features: The most recent Open Forum, Ancient Geeks, Tab Clearing, and Photo For Friday posts.
Trending: The most popular posts according to an algorithm I don’t understand. (We’ve been testing on a developmental site with no visitors, so I have no feel for how it works. It’s organic to the theme, so we figured we’d give it a shot.)
The four most recent posts from each of the following categories:
- US Politics
- World Politics
- Democracy
- National Security
And, finally
- Selected: The most recent posts from the Business and Economics, etc. categories.
Mobile users will see a somewhat cleaned-up version of the current mobile site, which simply serves a truncated version of the site header and the 15 most recent posts.
I’m sure we’ll tweak as we go along, but I wanted to get the new-look site, which is built on a modern theme, rolled out as quickly as possible.
There’s some new built-in functionality that simply wasn’t available on our eight-year-old theme, which had become increasingly incompatible with recent WordPress builds.
Alas, there’s also likely to be some growing pains. Most notably, the @Reply feature, which came courtesy of a plugin that hasn’t been updated in years, doesn’t play well with the theme. We’re experimenting with nested comments as a workaround. To start, we’re limiting that to three deep to avoid absurdity.
I’m still at the beach for a couple more days and will be on the road all day Saturday. But I’ll sporadically monitor the comments here for bug reports and the like.
For posterity’s sake, here’s a shot of the site from before the relaunch:
And of the site just after launching with the new design:
UPDATE: I’ll have to get used to the way the new design does the featured image. I initially had the screencap of the new site as said image, but it created a deja vu second blog. (I deleted the Site Wonkiness post, since said wonkiness lasted 20 minutes or so and nobody had commented on the post.)
UPDATE 2: It took me very little time on the live site to see that Trending posts were redundant on the front page, since it’s almost certain to just be the most recent posts most days. Gone! I’ve left it as the footer on individual post pages.
UPDATE 3: While our posting pace the last couple of days is likely unsustainable once I’m back at the office next week, it demonstrated that five Latest Posts is inadequate. Because the category sections are selective, some near-new substantive posts simply disappear from the page in Desktop/Tablet mode. I’ve added a second block of eight to test it out. I need to adjust the padding, but that’ll have to wait until Sunday at least.
I’ve made several other minor tweaks in response to reader comments, including adding a comment counter to the top of post pages. Right now, inexplicably, it’s simply a number without “Comments” or the like. That should be fixable, but not today. (Temporarily bumped from July 2, 7:52 am)
