We’ve been working on an “OSNews version 5” upgrade for several months, and with several months to go, we decided to make some incremental changes to OSNews on the existing codebase. The major change, as you probably already noticed, is that we’ve removed the “Page1/Page2” tabs and instead have OSNews stories with original content and commentary in one column, and news, items on OS-related topics gleaned from other sources in the other. Read on for more details on the changes we’ve implemented.
First of all, we’d love to hear your feedback on our new front page direction, so feel free to chime in down in the comments of this story. We felt that while the page1/page2 divide was increasing exposure of OSNews original stories, but it had the unintended consequence of diverting people’s attention away from all the other interesting news we post. We’re happy to keep refining this improvement, so if you have suggestions, we’d love to hear them.
Secondly, in addition to the page1/page2 change, we’ve eliminated several site features in an attempt to streamline the site’s back-end overhead in advance of the code overhaul that’s underway. During a flurry of feature additions a few years ago, we added a bunch of functionality, with the thought that we’d throw some stuff against the wall and see what sticks. After having them available for all this time, it’s clear that some of this stuff just didn’t stick. In fact, we’re curious to see if you’ll notice they’re gone.
We’d like to hold a little contest. If you notice a missing feature, post it in the comments. The first person to point out each missing feature will win ten units of net-fame.
It looks a lot of better than before.
I prefer this sidebar instead of those old links in the midle of other information.
Sometimes I missed great news just because of this, now, with this new layout I won’t miss any news.
Thank you
+1 on the better sidebar.
Well, I’m missing my Galaxy.osnews sidebar links, as well as the OSNews Blog sidebar links. But I still manage to stagger through my meager existence without them!
While I hail the death of page 2 I miss OSnews staff blog links and comment links .. maybe put a link to those into the top navigation bar?
We will find a new place for those items. I’ll put an update here when I figure out where to put them.
I love it! I never liked that Page 1/2 thing and I thought it was a step in a wrong direction back when it was introduced. I did realize, however, that there was a need to separate “Stories” from “News”. (I would prefer names “News” and “Links” instead, though.)
I find this new sidebar solution to be very elegant and efficient.
There is one thing I don’t like. “Recent Originals” section is completely superficial and it has only one purpose: To make that big-fat-ugly square banner that is so out place, look a little less… Well, out of place. Thankfully, I managed to adblock both the “Recent Originals” section and the banner and now the site looks as it should.
FTR, I am not turning AdBlock off until that thing is gone. Thanks for understanding.
Edit: Typos…
Edited 2010-02-08 20:20 UTC
I didn’t get that “page 1 & 2” thing… now It’s so much better.
BTW I think “News” table can be merged into the main area too… There aren’t enough news and articles to justify two separated areas. Just one is better. KISS.
I like the direction of the changes.
I do agree that I’d prefer a single column as I don’t always see the rationale behind the placement of an article. For example, I enjoyed “Virtio: An I/O Virtualisation Framework for Linux” but somehow “News” seems to be the wrong categorization.
The new layout is a great improvement to the site.
The “Recent Originals” box now looks a bit out of place.
Recent originals is a placeholder in that space. We’ll be replacing it with something more meaningful.
You can see all the news at a glance without having to click on the “All News” tab that was there before. I have missed stories that I wanted to read more about in the past because of that thing as well. Not to mention that the whole thing looks much more cleaner than before.
I definitely think that it is an improvement over the old layout!
And I am curious to see if the regulars will notice what is gone. I just noticed that the number of items in the “My Account” menu on the top right corner seems a bit shorter but I can’t for the life of me remember what is missing… ^_^
…though I’ve noticed the “Conversations” bit is gone. It wasn’t used much anyway.
One thing I do miss is the “Recently posted comments” 8or whatever it was called) list.
I was fond of the “Random Stories” section, it was a fun way to have a peek to past and see how things and perceptions evolve.
the same for “Latest comments”, more than once it took me to topics that hadn’t caught my interest by its headline.
The “staff’s blog entries”… well, some where interesting (Kroc’s particularly)… but others… OMG! “my daily tweet”… “No Doubt is in MyVeryBestTopFive”… WTF?!?! That was infuriating… good riddance for those, and please do not allow anything that lame again (Aaaarrgggg!!!)
On the new layout, the sidebar strikes me as too long but maybe it does serve the porpuse of preventing new from slipping out too fast.
UKB
edit: sections names
Edited 2010-02-08 20:55 UTC
Much better. The “Page 2” business really was very poor. At least now when I hit the back button after reading a page 2 story, it takes me to where I was rather than page 1 again. Nice to be able to read the synopsis too.
I’m going to miss the OSNews staff blog links and the shortcuts to my own comments that I used to have there.. but its worth the loss.
That was my main grudge against the Page 1 / Page 2 tabs, using the [Back] button never took me back to Page 2.
… and while we’re at it…
– The login routine never worked very well in this version, as it’s been mentioned by others in the past.
– While I’m aware of the efforts to prevent abuse of the modding/voting system it would be nice to be able to cast at least one single vote/mod in a thread one has commented on.
Seconded. I can see the rationale for preventing down-votes after someone has posted a comment – to prevent users from punitively down-voting someone that they’re engaged in an argument with. But what’s the potential for abuse of up-voting? You can’t bury a post by voting it up, and I can’t see any practical negative results of (E.g.) voting-up someone else who disagrees with someone you’ve argued with (with the exception of those who use comment scores to judge who’s “winning”).
IMO the most sensible approach would be to prevent users from down-modding posts that they’ve replied to, and posts that are replies to them (or at most, prevent users from moderating comments in threads where that user has posted).
I would prefer a layout of Stories on the left, and News on the right, the whole page split right down the middle. I also want the page to take up the entire available width of my browser, not just stick in the center…
The split idea would be appealing to me too, but only when I’m on the wide screen monitor.
Not sure about your other comment though. The content is currently spread across my entire monitor, taking up the full browser window.
I think the site should stretch across the whole browser window. I just opened it up in Chrome, IE, and FF, and if you have a wide enough browser window, you get blank space on either side. Well, I have a widescreen monitor (1920×1200) and I would like to make good use of all that space! It’s just a simple two-pane auto-sizing CSS layout…
Current HTML/CSS is an insane mess, liquid layout may be possible in 4.x, but it’s definitely coming in 5 (table layout CSS FTW!)
I’m on a 24″ widescreen with a resolution of 1920×1080, and Mozilla Firefox 3. OSNews is stretched from one side of the browser window to the other. Maybe because I’ve “zoomed” OSNews quite a bit to read the text at that resolution…
Me three
Although I agree with those who have commented so far that it’s much better than the old layout, I don’t think that news items should have to play ‘second fiddle’ to original stories.
Edit: Actually, now that I think about it, I think it would be better if all these items were mixed together like they used to be. Having to scan two different columns is a bit of a pain in the arse, IMHO.
Edited 2010-02-08 22:34 UTC
There might still be a few little bugs I think…
When you click on “More news” under the right sidebar, you get to see the old style front page/page 2 tabs, but they don’t work. There is no obvious working link back to the original news page except clicking on the OSNews header.
Also, in that situation, you see the same news in both the left and the right column…
and the osnews staff blog links were interesting now and then
unless this just got changed, i haven’t been able to edit my comments once they’ve been posted.
of course, not it seems to be working.
Edited 2010-02-08 21:22 UTC
Dear sweet jesus THANK YOU.
That page two BS was ridiculous.
OSnews is (still) on my “daily reader” list because of the interesting and topical mix of news plus original stories. However, I am not a fan of having to click through several “areas” to see what’s interesting — whether that’s Page 1/Page 2 or News/Originals. Can there be a way to just get it all on one page?
It IS in one page. Page 1, and the full-content page 2 items.
Either that, or the RSS feed which displays both combined.
The mobile page still works that way ( http://mobile.osnews.com ).
And, as Kroc mentioned, the RSS feed does contain all items. There’s a PHP script out there called RSS2HTML ( http://www.rss2html.com/ ) – if you have a hosting account with PHP enabled, and a bit of HTML know-how, it would be fairly easy to setup your own customized version of the OSNews frontpage.
Cool work Adam. This brings up some interesting UX decisions.
When viewing Pg.2 itself, I don’t think Pg.1 should be shown in the side bar. We could use the Pg.2’s sidebar for the other lesser stuff (Staff blogs perhaps?). Staff blog could perhaps be a link in the main toolbar also.
I really do like the presence of the side bar. It would be better if the icon was left of the title, and there was one line space between the teaser and the comments link.
Yes, there are a few things to fix tomorrow.
One feature that has been missing is the ability to switch browsers, or switch computers, and have the read status follow you. Would be nice if this was stored on the server somehow, instead of being a cookie/session stored with the client browser.
There’s nothing worse than reading through 10 pages of comments on one computer, then using a different computer to check the story again … and having to page through 10 pages of “new” messages, hoping to remember which ones I’ve read.
This is the only site I’ve been on where the read status of message is not saved with the account details on the server.
And the site is loading faster than ever!
Now I can troll even more efficiently.
Real glad that terribly outdated page with some book recommendations from ca. 2004 and such has been completely overhauled and turned into a more dynamic Shopping page.
You are still on time to fix a bug that seriously affect usability in mobile phones:
The “action buttons” at the bottom of each excerpt (rate, read more, comments) are too close together, and too close to the header of the next news items, for easy finger interaction. This happens at least in Android, where zooming in/out is (very) far more inconvenient than in iPhone.
Try iphone.osnews.com
Oh, I didn’t know it existed.
But isn’t the page that opens from Android already specially formatted for small screens? I thought it already was a for-mobile version, or some CSS magic in action.
Anyway, wouldn’t something more generic like “mobile.osnews.com” be better? Why brand this site with an Apple trademark?
There already is a mobile.osnews.com, it’s formatted for non-smart mobile devices. For now, the enhanced smartphone page is iphone.osnews.com. We may, at some point, rename it to something like touch.osnews.com, but those are your options today.
Its rather cramped looking on my netbook, but looks nice on my desktop.
Why do “Top comments” not link to the comment itself, but the thread?
Pretty useless, specially when the thread has tens of comments.
You’d rather view a permalink, which is much less information? Wouldn’t you rather view the comment itself, and then the subsequent replies? I don’t understand your complaint…?
Edit: OK, forget what I said. When seeing all the replies below the linked comment, I thought I was looking at all the comments for that article, and that the comment I was interested in was somewhere down.
I see now that the comment at the very top is the one linked to.
Edited 2010-02-09 18:40 UTC
Um… I’m not sure what to say. The link does not take you to a list of comments, it takes you to that exact comment and the thread that follows. Not sure what else I can tell you here.
Yep, my mistake. I realized that later, so edited the message you were answering to. The way it is is the way it should be. Thanks for clearing up!
I sure like the site better, now: I’m missing the Gnome Files feed though.
Rehdon
I like it better this way.
It’s amazing the number of technology and security sites that ask for input without bother to provide any SSL. Any site asking at minimum for a username and password should at least redirect through an https connection.
OSNews isn’t alone. Techrepublic continues to lack any security consideration for it’s user login also.
Basically this was the best part of the site for me. Has it been moved? I really hate having to scroll through all the comments just to find the newest one or two and monitoring the totals to see if they have changed. As it stands I haven’t been coming back to this site very much in the past few days because of this.
The only reason I like the two column layout is because when I used to click on a Page 2 article, read it, and wanted to go back, my browser always directed me to Page 1. Then I would lose my place on the Page 2 list.
Unfortunately, though, I also liked to bump up the font size to read the articles better. Now I have to scale it back down to view all the articles on my 1280px screen.
Also, as mentioned in other comments, I liked the old sidebar features.
I can’t find the link to the http://www.osnews.com/resources webpage anymore?
Actually it is the Resource Links to different operating systems I want, the rest of that webpage isn’t important to me. I just want the “Resource Links” to syllable, aros, reactos etc
Another positive vote for the new layout, it works a lot better with my older web browsers.