looks good. needs more art.

Serendipity gets a big boost.  Inclined to agree with Reed re art.  It doesn't have to be Danish cartoons, but worth some thought about what else might be an add-on rather than a distraction.

Todd Gitlin

Bolton seems to be the owner of the site, with Josh as his guest.  He'd be better next to the guy with the funny hat.

The front page does indeed look nice.

Usability with Safari does suck pretty bad at this point, however.

And finally, there's a line break problem with Safari that existed in the early days of the original site, but quickly got fixed. For example, after this sentence, I'm going to hit return twice.

But when I view my comment, the extra line break separating the two paragraphs has disappeared.

I like the new design a lot, Josh. I think it's a huge step up from the previous, cramped layout.

we're working on this

I like the new design Josh. Do agree with those suggesting more artwork, since it looks a little text-heavy and dry at present. Definitely prefer the more 'modern' look though.

(Whilst I'm being picky - and in the spirit of not wanting a friend to go out on a date with garlic breathe - could you please suggest Matt Yglesias change his photo? At present, it makes his face look 'highly punchable', as Douglas Adams once said. Plus, it's just a bad photo, which appears a lot on the main page, what with all the interesting things Matt normally has to say. That's my opinion anyway.)

Oh, and while I'm at it, why don't you just dispense with the photo box every time someone who doesn't have a photo is posted, instead of having a 'photo not submitted' graphic. It seems redundant.

Great work all round though.

Functionality and aesthetics are both vastly improved by the redesign, but the site still feels too chaotic. There's too much going on for the uninitiated who aren't familiar with the dynamics of the blogosphere to understand how to use this site. There are so many words and links and places to visit, a newcomer is easily overwhelmed.
 

My last thought: the copy is too wide. On Matt Yglesias' blog, for example, reading his entries causes eye strain. There needs to be a narrower body of text.

- Oz

  WiredOpinion.com
 

The comment tracking is a very good point and that will be implemented in the next 24 to 36 hours.  The issue of Scoop is another issue entirely.  I know Scoop has many fans.  But we were quite dissatisfied with it -- for reasons that were not necessarily clear on the user end.  Indeed, the genesis of this redesign was to get away from Scoop. 

Just an early visceral reaction -- I'm certain I can get used to the new laying without major problems, though I haven't made up my mind yet whether I prefer it to the previous site. 

A couple of thoughts -- I find that reading online, which I also do a lot of, is quite different than reading in print. Consequently, I tend to prefer sans serif fonts online, especially when the print is small. Sans serif print usually looks crisper and clearer to me on the screen. The print in the main columns also might be easier to read if it were darker.

I think it might also help if there was more of a color contrast between the beige background and the white content area. The absence of such contrast seems to make everything blur together for me and keeps me from focusing on any one thing as I scan the main page. In the same vein, I sense that the front page could use more color generally. Perhaps this is what folks are reacting to in suggesting more art is needed.  

Finally, is there any way to cut and paste content from within this easy editor?

Having said all this, I know what a challenge it is to design or redesign a website. I thought the first site was both very professional and very functional. My biggest complaint was with the lack of threaded discussions. I'm sure over time, the redesign will be terrific as well.

I second Dindrane's comment.  It is not art that is needed, in my opinion, but a bit more color and contrast.  However, I am viewing the site on my laptop.  Maybe it will look better on my desktop monitor.

Also, someone already mentioned this, but it appears you need to insert an extra line break in the easy editor to get a single line break in the displayed post. (I just did it here, but not in my previous post.)

Fully agree about the art. The old picture of an 18th cent. salon was a nice touch. 

What is the KARMA in the bio about?
I have an idea what Karma is, but I'm puzzled by the
3.33 under "Karma." Is that a good number or what? 

OK, I'm starting to get the new organization, and there are some things I'm really starting to like.

The tab for the discussion tables takes you to a handy compendium of recent posts in each of the tables.  Previously, the Foreign Policy Table, and other similar tables, were accessed through a low-profile drop-down menu.  The posts there tended to generate few comments, and it wasn't really a great place to start a discussion.  If you wanted to discuss some topic, you had to wait until one of the regular contributors or invited contributors started the discussion, and then jump in.  I suspect the greater prominence of the discussion tables in the new design will lead to them being used more often.

There is a clearer distinction now between the Coffee House and the rest of the site.  Previously, posts from the other main departments/blogs, like Matt Yglesias, the Warren Reports and America Abroad were sometimes included in the Coffee House, so that the latter served as a kind of home page compendium.  Now, as I understand it, the home page gives you a left column with the Coffee House, which is now more of a separate, generalist department/blog with its own lineup of regular contributors and guests, and a right column with an Inside TPM Cafe compendium of the other departments.  At first I found this disorienting, but now I think I like it.  It allows more content to appear on the home page, but also organizes the content in a more logical way.

While I agree with others that the Track feature doesn't replace the function of the old My Comments area, and that the My Comments area should he returned,  the Track is a pretty good new feature in any case.  You can quickly see all of the posts on which you participated, and find out which ones are still active, with the numbers of new comments boldly highlighted.  It might be better if you could get to the Track area without having to first go to My Account, however.  Just a suggestion: Put "Track" and "My Comments" links on the top menu next to "My Account", "My Inbox" etc., and to create room, drop the text size adjuster to a different location.

 <i>Usability with Safari does suck pretty bad at this point, however.</i><p>You can download Firefox for Mac free, and it works much,much better for blogs such as this one.  I can actually read the "welcome..." line easily.  Firefox used to load pretty slowly on my Mac, but the latest version is just a bit slower than Safari - which is still my favorite browser.  Firefox now has a RSS reader too, another goodie.

Hoppy in Sacramento

"You can download Firefox for Mac free, and it works much,much better for blogs such as this one.  I can actually read the "welcome..." line easily."

Thanks for the tip, but I'm not going to switch browsers to get the site to work properly. Safari has enough marketshare that I figure they'll get around to making the site work right with it after not too long.

Safari works perfectly on every other blog I've visited.

I will nitpick here, but why is there over 70 HTML/markup errors?

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tpmcafe.com

I am a big fan of standards compliance in web site design, and I would be very happy to see a standards compliant TPMCafe. 

To me that's the magic of the physical newspaper.  Over the last few years I've switched over almost entirely to reading papers online.  There's economy, ease of use, the fact that I can access things all in one place.  But it's also been very clear to me that my reading has been impoverished by it. 

The web allows me to drill down into the political stuff where my attention first focuses.  And I just don't see that other stuff.

Except for the reading of newspapers and news magazines online, which I find inefficient: me too.

Just thought you'd like to know you are not alone.

Currently, the art of "layout" on blogs and MSM news sites is at a very primitive state. It actually ends up unintentionally allowing for the powers that be, making the selections/decisions of what is home paged or similar, to have much more power over what readers end up thinking is the important news, on what they spend their time informing themselves about.

The net is good on depth but is very bad at furnishing breadth and balance. The problems really are all about layout and systemics. In any field, it's superb for research, you can reinforce your preconceptions so so easily. You can ignore contrarian thoughts on any issue or thought so so easily.

Yes, newspapers always did this, too. It is a matter of degree. But for example, I am always amazed when I take time to look at the front page WSJ international news digest, which takes only a minute or so, how little of what is there has been covered by the blogs i frequent.

There is also the quality factor. I get addicted to reading all the comments of the Tom, Dick and Harry's I know in the blog world, on the issues that the blog world framed, and it's all fun and good because I get a sense of what people active in the left of center political world are thinking, but then I visit Arts and Letters Daily after a long absence, and I see a ton of great writing with great thoughts on many other issues, the kinds of things that I used to read and keep up on by spending more time on print, and I feel my reading has really "dumbed down."

One of the very bad results I see is the echo chamber thing, truly, and it's in a larger sense than the simple political sense most people mean it. It's a perspective thing. I can think back to when I and many others were following every incident hour-by-hour in the Iraq invasion and war as methodically as Juan Cole, to the detriment of the perspective of knowing about what else was going on in the world. From doing that, one got the sense that nothing else important was happening in the world, and then one is shocked to find that Europeans or Latin Americans or Africans don't think the same way, didn't see it as such a big deal.  In a way, one easily gets a imperial view, like everything America does is so important. more important than the rest of the world thinks it.  This is dangerous, one could think of it as getting close to how Israel-Palestine centric Arab media is.

As for the newsaper sites themselves, I can speak on that of the New York Times with a teeny bit of authority, having spent a great deal of time in the past (dumbly, in retrospect! I am not proud I got addicted to this!) reposting their articles on a news board after reading the print edition every day. What I saw from that: their home page is edited quite differently from the print edition; there are substantial and important differences. The home page responds to vox populi, it changes not only with "breaking," but very much is laid out to get maximum clicks to a bigger, more general audience. In print, the layout editors, the headline people, they still try to balance with their impression of "need to know," what's important today, ala Walter Cronkite. I know many are actually angry about this paradigm, but I would ask those people to consider the fact that making layout of "important headline news" more responsive to public preference, is that not taking us along the road to what happened to Ted Turner's CNN? Pandering to audience preference in news is a good thing?

I don't know what the solution is, but I am sure there is one. As an art historian, it's very clear to me that the world of internet layout is very young, that everything is very primitive, including how users think and use.  Traditional full-page newspaper layout is actually a very sophisticated thing, honed by centuries of trial and error, as is most of periodical literature. Because to our minds the acreage of computer screens cannot compare, because they are more like tabloid formats does not mean there is not an answer. We just can't "see" what it is yet, our eyes and brains haven't even been trained in doing it yet, there has been a very short trial and error period. Our brains still operate mostly on the old paradigm.

I laud your efforts to work on that, to offer solutions. Try out stuff, what else is there?  Get on it, everyone with a website, think out of the box, try new things. Of course, I am prejudiced about your own trial choice here because I have many decades of "training" in use of print format. I also relate to writing by identifying with the author as a personality, that's how I judge things, so the photos really cause me to sort of sign with comfort, as in: ah, this makes it easier.

But maybe that 9 year old looking at TPMCafe for the first time sees it as totally illogical  :-) Maybe he has a real good solution.

The art of layout  is the issue and we are in  a brave new world. And it is an art and it is not as simple as people think. Every print (and visual broadcast for that matter) product you ever used regularly, you have been trained in using it. It is easy to forget that once we were taught what page numbers mean, how to read a dial clock or a calendar. My illiterate grandma saw only spots of black and white on printed pages, but could spot a pod on a tree 4 stories up and recreate complicated crochet patterns without instructions. Only a few decades ago, there were still people of primitive tribes who, if you showed them a black-and-white photograph, would only see splotches of black and white ink, but they could spot and identify any animal track.

I'll disagree on whether the home page (or Coffee House) should be a compendium. I  just want to see what's new and possibly worth reading, without clicking through and loading five pages. I know you have to do that to get everything in the New York Times (national, international, etc.), but let's keep this in perspective: TPM is not my major news source, and I can't afford to spend an hour reading it. Basically, guys, if you want me to see something, show it to me.

 John

http://www.haberarts.com/

Isn't this accomplished by the new format jhaber? It seems to me that more posts show on the home page than before, and that the amount of text for each of those post that appears above the "more" or "continue reading" fold is about the same as before.  They haven't made the home page more of a compendium by limiting it to headlines and little bites, but by squeezing more content into the page.

It might be just a personal taste thing or something about my monitor, but the main content seems squeezed in between the two inch-wide beige borders on left and right and then the white banner columns.  Reading it gives me the sensation I get when sitting in the middle seat of a crowded commuter train.   It seems claustraphobic to me.

The middle bar is a bit thinner for some reason.

In general the layout seems a bit too arbitray. Maybe that is in part due to the lack of strongly defined sections. All of the portrait cionc act like bullets, but there is a lack of strong titles and sectional navigation, so it feels a bit too jumbled with everything vying for attention, and little structure.

The left bar could use a stronger title bar. The right side advertising bar could be differentiated a bit more (line boxing maybe) to decrease it's visual jumble from flowing into and interfering with the page and tabs layout.

Josh -- I like it and agree on the serendipity aspect of newsprint (I find it more so in British papers than in staid US papers like NYT or WaPo.) As for color/art -- heck, I force a grey background on EVERY webpage I see and I find it easier on the eyes. So there's no real need to do it, except -- if you want a serendipitous experience, you should really establish a arts, sports, "letter from Paris/London/Moscow" column, along with the political stuff. Give us a reason to turn to the pages, since the political bloggers (except for Matt) may only turn in one-two posts a day.

The pictures of the writers are very small and rather unappealing.   Josh is probably the worst --- I bet that he is (can be?) better looking.  One solution is to provide also a larger, nicer picture that appears when you click of the thumbnail.

Josh,

I couldn't agree more about the "serendipitous" nature of traditional newspapers, and I think the redesign is a wonderful response to that dynamic.

Interestingly enough, the changes made here at the Cafe seem to answer questions I raised in a joint essay that I posted a few weeks ago with blogger Star A. Decise of The Enigmatic Paradox. In it, we addressed many of the design elements missing from most news and information blogs, and made some of these very same comparisons to traditional newspaper layouts.

Congrats on the new look - and your celebration of serendipity. :-)

Alphonse ( Al ) Kada

S'cuse me, but have I missed the link to the Mothership?  Or am I just missing the link to the Mothership?

And getting really annoyed with this carriage return / hard break coding problem.

That said, the features that were asked for in the Cafe Management discussions seem to be all there.  Good effort, Josh, Kate, et all.

Al Kada (formerly known as Notrol) 

Serendipitousness - that's exactly what TPM Cafe needed. Very nice! I also like being able to see what's going on at all the discussion tables at a glance. With your unusual design and your amazing circle of talent, Josh, you need a new name for this whatever-it-is. It's gone way beyond "blog."

Reader Blogs  -:-  what brings them to the top of the heap now?

         In the old days we had the option to recommend or not and that appeared to bring a reader blog to the front page.  How is that done now?

        Second, how do I get to Reader Blogs without going to the sitemap on the main page?

         The reason I care is that every couple days I used to check out what was in Reader Blogs.  I like somone to read what I write and assume others appreciate readers too.  In the old days I would comment and/or recommend, as appropriate. Now it appears that we are dooming most reader blogs to a vast dark hole.

Thanks for increasing the font size. My eyes were really strained with the previous small font you had.

Is there a link to the mother site i.e. talkingpointsmemo? I can't find it anywhere. 

I like your thinking, Josh--this serendipity is why I've always liked newspapers. Used to be, in the 1950s and 60s, one could pick up, as I did every evening on way home from work, several newspapers (and magazines, they were better then) for pennies really. The development of the blogosphere reminds me of those times. Plus we're on the ground floor of a resurgence of real reporting and journalism. A thousand I. F. Stones are blooming!

Yeah, what's up with the funny hat guy? He looks as if he has a B-2 landed on his head. I'd like to vote for losing the Bolton image, too.

For those of us with "older eyes" -- the changes are not all that good.  The typeface for articles and comments needs much higher contrast, and it should be a larger font. 

"JmacSF"

John McCutchen

San Francisco. CA

I rather like the format and the more after reading Josh's description.

Am a little annoyed by the comments changes

Let's try again using explicit paragraph tags after this word...

...Did it work?