New Look

Ed,
I really dig this new look. Nice job!

Personally, I like the old look better. But maybe I just fear change...

Is it me, or is the page taking longer to load than before?

Love it. And it loaded instantly for me.

I like the look, but it took me a long time to load it as well.

Doesn't seem to work in Firefox on Windows...
Be well,
Dave H.

Had trouble loading on Firefox. First time, got only left hand column, spread all across the screen. Second time it loaded, but slowly.
I'm with Enigma on this. Old look lots better. Easier to read. This one is cluttered.

I use Firefox and it loads fine on my system. You guys may have caught me in the middle of rebuilding as I did a bit more tinkering. But if you continue to have problems, please email me so I can get that fixed. I've got another template in mind as well, and if the consensus is that this one isn't well liked, I may change to that one. It's much more subtle than this one, but it's two column and I'd really like to have a 3 column look.
As far as the loading time is concerned, that may be the result of having to draw from other sources, not of the template itself. Between the sitemeter stats, the referral script, the technorati placement and now the google ads, every time this page loads it has to contact 4 other servers to pull information from them, so that may slow it down a bit. I may also need to reduce the number of posts on the main page, since it gets really, really long after a while. Or perhaps I should start using the "continued" thing more rather than putting the full posts on the front page.

What do you guys think of this look? It's much simpler, but only two columns.

Looks good.

I like the 3 column look, but it takes forever to load in Firefox.

Don

The medium brown type on the light brown background slows me down a bit, especially the smaller type in the "recent comments" section.

I've been putting off getting new glasses, so maybe it's just me...

Ok, it was working for me bofore (even if it was slower than normal) but now when i load the page, the middle and right columns start below the left column...

Not Kosher. Hope you get it fixed soon, Ed. Don't let style take away from this kick ass 'blog. lol.

I like the look, but also had the download time issue. I hit the reload button after a bit and it went faster. I'm also running firefox on windows.

Okay, I've made a few adjustments. I fixed the problem of it rendering in IE so it should now look the same in both browsers. And I edited some of my posts so that only the first couple paragraphs are on the main page. That should cut down on the load time a bit. If there are any other problems with how it should look, please let me know.

I don't have any objection to the new style. I liked the old one, but this one actually loads faster for me than the old one did (remarking on some comments that indicated that the new one was slow).

But I'm still on dial-up, so nothing is fast for me.

It would be nice if you would allow for automatic paragraphing for comments, though. It's a bit annoying to have to do the HTML tags just to accomplish paragraphing. Or am I missing something?

I actually don't know why you have to do that, raj, and I agree it's annoying. On my old blog at mblog, it worked just fine without it. I don't know if it has something to do with the upgrade to Movable Type 3.x or what.

I like it. But then, "de gustibus non est disputandum."

Thanks, Ed. I'll have to experiment

That said, I do have to say that you and your various co-conspirators from Panda's Thumb have some of the most intelligent blogs around. And commenters, too. (Present company excepted, of course.) Kudos

BTW, you might be interested in knowing that the mynym character (remember him?) turned up on the "ex-gay watch" a couple of days ago. http://exgay.blogs.com/xgw/

I'm running Firefox on XP, and it doesn't work for me. Just one big column.

I'm running Firefox on XP, and it doesn't work for me. Just one big column.
How very strange. I run Firefox on Windows 98 and it looks perfect. I've contacted the guy who wrote the template and he has offered to take a look at it when he gets home tonight. Hopefully he'll figure it out.

Paul, try refreshing. It was doing the same thing for me a while ago, but then I reloaded the page and it looks fine now. (I'm also using XP and Firefox.)

I don't even use CSS very much nowadays; I just turn it all off in my browser's preferences. Too much fancy doodads for me. Therefore, I have no opinion. Cheers!

It will take some getting used to, in terms of reading text in different highlights, but the main window layout is certainly easier to follow.

Hmm...load time is still way up there. On the order of 10 seconds or so, and I'm on a university T1 line.

It appears in my browser (Safari) as a single column - so the changes make it almost unreadable.

OK - tried refreshing and that seems to have done it. Looks pretty good now!

I like it ! Before, I couldn't bring up the site from my Safari browser (Macintosh), but now I can. Great !

Firefox on both XP and Win98 seem to be OK after an initial slow load on both with a 1.5 kbps DSL line. I myself like a wider 'content' column, since (as a semi-senior citizen) I tend to magnify the page one Firefox Ctrl+ notch for easy reading.

I myself like a wider 'content' column...

I'm with you on that one, RBH. I like the look and layout of Brian Leiter's blog.

The only links that work for me are in the central column. The links in the two side columns appear as text only, not hypertext.

I am using Opera 7.54

@Grasshopper: Same here, using Opera 8.0 build 7497. There are no active links in the outer two columns.

In Firefox on my Mac I get one big, wide column and have to scroll half way to Jersey to get to the text at all. At first, it took so long to get to the text I didn't think there WAS any!

A comment from an Opera newsgroup on the problem with Opera not seeing links in the outermost columns:

"The links work fine when first loaded (while the rest of the page is loading) suggesting an overlay problem. If a <div> is improperly positioned, Opera may consider it to cover the previous contents and this makes them unclickable. Since the center column is still clickable, it would seem this is the likely culprit."

Maybe you could check your div pairing, especially in the center column?

Jon-
I contacted the creator of this template yesterday about the Opera problem and he said he knows about it and is planning to redo the code to fix it in the next couple of weeks. I'm hesitant to play around with the div tags because I've already managed to screw things up that way a couple of times and had to have him fix it. He said the solution is more complicated than that, and he knows how to fix it and will get to it soon. So I'll have it fixed as soon as he sends me an update.