Welcome to the Redesign

Long-time SugarBank readers will know I have a tendency to redesign every time the temperature changes by three or more degrees. Most of what I’ve done thus far has been a mixture of learning from past mistakes and wild experimentation fueled by ad deals, boredom and exposure to some of the jaw-droppingly nice layouts other people have coaxed from Wordpress. This redesign goes deeper though and has a few new features so I’d I’ll talk you though it.

Feed-readers who think websites are too 20th century to care about - normal service will resume shortly.

So here’s a brief summary of the changes and improvements:

To encourage feedback the top 10 commenters over the last few months are now listed on every page.

You get to see your name (fun!) and if you have a site/blog your name is linked and you can use that list to get traffic from SugarBank. I figure the people who read the site will have read a lot of your comments and probably want to know who the hell you are.

The rankings will change over time. Right now the rankings go back six months, I may change that if it doesn’t seem right, gets boring or causes a shift in space-time continuity.

User editable comments
No more will you have to re-post corrections or feel dumb for making a mistake. Click on the box over your comment to launch an AJAX editing box you can use to put sense into your nonsense.

I’ve also added captions to images. So there.

I’ve limited the correction time to 15 minutes so conversations aren’t revised in ways that make later entries seem nonsensical. (plugin)

Related Posts
Lists of related posts beneath each entry makes finding similar posts easier. I don’t need an image for this, just scroll down.

Last modified dates
The ‘Last modified’ date will show on any post I’ve touched since publication. It makes spotting my revisionist history changes easy, useful if you’re coming back to comment as I might have made a correction, acknowledged a comment or removed an error since you read the original. You can see it workinghere, just beside the publish date at the top left of the page beneath the title.

An index
I’ve indexed SugarBank by name and tag, an idea I stole from the ‘Wall Street Journal’. You can quickly find every post which mentions an individual, vanity search for kicks, or view posts using any of the top 200 keywords in use.

Improved search
Searches now (finally!) return the number of results found, and include links to related searches. For example this search for ‘sexy video‘. Unlike the old site, the search box (top right of the page) works on every page. It should have before but… it just didn’t. Sorry. Fixed.

Post summaries
Post summaries condense the core of each post into a single sentence which makes skimming posts easier and adds richness to search results and other post listings. The summaries are always presented in italics below the main post title. See the top of this page, or the column of recent posts below and to the left for examples.

Faster page loads
Thanks to a one-full post per page limit you no longer have to load megabytes of redundant information. To keep the site easy to skim, 15 posts are presented on each page but only one in full, the others as title and summary only. As a bonus, larger images, the cause of the last design’s geologically slow load times, are now all shown in full. This design accommodates wide, tall and very large images with equal aplomb.

Bigger, better video
I’m now hosting all the video I can to prevent posts ‘rotting’ when clips are removed from other sites (like YouTube, bastards). I’m taking the opportunity to offer clips at larger sizes and in better quality than is common elsewhere because that’s what I’d like to see on the blogs I read. It’s expensive and time consuming but worth it. Check this out for an example:

Improved typography
Everything here should be easier to read than before. Post bodies have been shrunk into a column format aimed at optimizing line-lengths for legibility and I spent a lot of time thinking about colors, spacing and fonts too. It’s hard to make screen-text pretty, but this should be legible.

Better advertising
More of each page is given to content but more prominent ads are displayed on older posts. This should encourage people to link here - many of whom are put off by visible ads - and reward regular visitors by making their reading almost ad free. As most people are visiting old posts it shouldn’t hit income much at all (he said confidently).

This redesign has forced me to go through every post since the start of the blog to tweak, add fields and fix typos. It was educational, I have a clear idea of how the blogs evolved and what I’d like to do more and less of. As for design and layout changes, I doubt they’re over - this is a fundamental change I’m sure there’ll be more to do, but I can say the blog has never looked or read better. If you’ve been here a while thanks for your kindness, I can’t believe how many typos there were (are).

Let me know what you think. I’ll be back on Monday - I’m going to Paris for the weekend.