Web Design Open Thread

Each blog should have, in parentheses or as a hover-over, brief description of what it is about. So, for Pharyngula, it would say something like: "evolution, development, genetics, cephalopods, creationism debate, religion and atheism"

Perhaps the blogroll should be on the right, black margin. That way the whole blogroll will automatically show up on each blog. This eliminates one click (to the main page) when the reader wants to move from one blog to the other. I like to scan all the SB blogs in the morning in alphabetical order and clicking back and forth through the homepage of SB is a distraction, takes additional time and additional clicks.

Some "advanced search" engine more prominently displayed.

Otherwise, I like the aggregator as it is. I am wondering how is it going to look like when there are 30-40 blogs, though...

Each blog should have, in parentheses or as a hover-over, brief description of what it is about. So, for Pharyngula, it would say something like: "evolution, development, genetics, cephalopods, creationism debate, religion and atheism"

That's a good one.

Perhaps the blogroll should be on the right, black margin. That way the whole blogroll will automatically show up on each blog.

I think they're trying to preserve the margin as a space for ads, or blank space to accomodate narrow monitors.

How about a pull-down menu on the top, or something like that?

Otherwise, I like the aggregator as it is. I am wondering how is it going to look like when there are 30-40 blogs, though...

That's what a lot of the discussion is about.

I do a lot of bouncing back and forth to the main page as well. I agree that it would be nice to see the blogroll on every page, at least who's updated when.

I'd like to see shorter blurbs, maybe with popup versions of the longer ones. I don't visit every day, and the page gets pretty long (and will only get longer. Visually speaking, I also kinda hate the highlighting of the entire blurb rather than, say, the title. (Or maybe I just need new glasses)

It might be better to have, rather than lastest entries, the latest entry of each blog, ordered by most recent entry. This would eliminate a page a mile long on days where everyone posts 5 entries.

And a link to the main page of each blog, in addition to a link to the full entry.

I have a lot of trouble posting from Firefox under Linux. My comments are rejected because the e-mail address is supposedly missing, although I always type it. The only blog where it does not happen is Ed Brayton's, probably because I have to login there.

There's a main page?

That sounds sarky and I (sort of) apologize for it, but it's a genuine criticism.

I read your blog and PZ's. In both cases, I come direct from a link in someone's blogroll (Nielsen Haydens' most often). I suppose it should have struck me that Science Blogs would have a main page; it would represent the value they add. But it hadn't (struck me, that is). Nor do I know how to get to it. I imagine there's a link somewhere in the stuff that surrounds your blog proper, but it never obtruded itself on my consciousness. If they want to draw traffic to it, they might make the link more perspicuous.

Roman Werpachowski -- its a cookie problem. clear all of your cookies in firefox and as you sign in it should accept whatever you enter.

When an entry only exists for a link, it would be nice to be able to get at the link directly.

jim: just go to scienceblogs.com.

1) That mostly empty right-handed sidebar is just begging to be filled with content.

2)The color outside of the white area in which Scienceblogs contains its content is awfully drab. If anything, change that color.

3)Why even do that? I'd expand the content area to the entire width of the page and just put verticle rules between the sidebars and the individual blog content.

4)I can't see the 4 navigation links above the blogitem title. Because I guess the font is white. Dumb!

5)For in-blog links to be the same color as all the other links in the sidebar and navbar, is pretty boring. Jazz up your link colors.

6)I like your stylesheet, for the most part. For me, I use Firefox 1.5.0.1 with Adblock v. 0.6.1.2. I adblock just using a few wildcard combinations (*, */*, *.*) so that I don't get any images, and use exceptions for stylesheets and individual website image categories I'd like to see. It's good that Scienceblogs chose to maximize it's usive of stylesheets (.css) for styling instead of piling up .gif's and .jpg's. Don't change that.

Joe,

thanks, it helped. BUT it seems that I have to do it each time I post a comment. Reflects very poorly on the blog software.

A pull-down menu of the whole blogroll that each blogger places on the left margin would be great!

The link to the main page (for those who did not figure it out yet) is the tiny little SB logo in the top left corner of each page here.

As the aggregator expands (with new blogs being added), perhaps the readers should have choices what to see and how to see it - that is always the best solution.

Umm...this is the pot calling the kettle black, but, can I request more science? I'm always reporting on politics and the politics of science (and others fall into this trap as well), but more posts which include accessible explanations of recent developments in science, esp. from the perspective of the blog author? Ok. I know...it's not easy...

Little nit: the encoding declaration on the html pages is for western european (iso-8859-1), but the actual documents seem to be UTF-8 encoded. This amounts to some goofy looking text when special characters (like dashes or non-standard apostrophe variants for instance) are used.

Using the IE View -> Encoding -> UTF-8 menu path seems to do the trick when a page uses those characters, but it's irritating. (Yes, it also happens in Firefox.)

Umm...this is the pot calling the kettle black, but, can I request more science? I'm always reporting on politics and the politics of science (and others fall into this trap as well), but more posts which include accessible explanations of recent developments in science, esp. from the perspective of the blog author? Ok. I know...it's not easy...

I'll try, but we're in a difficult part of the academic term right now, so I don't really have the time to do a large number of long science posts. I'm going to start trying to do more short news-y pieces, but the day job gets priority.

Thanks to all of you for the site design comments. I'll pass these on to the developer. And keep 'em coming...

It's been pointed out to me that there is a drop-down navigation menu for the various ScienceBlogs, up in the upper right of the page, directly underneath the big "Sb" and above the Seed ad. I never noticed it, either.

Larger fonts!!! On IE for windows you're coming in at 8-10 pt; on Firefox, when I enlarge the text much, the page layout is messed up.

Thanks.