By RPS on April 29th, 2008 at 12:50 pm.
Yes, we’ve had one. Will be tweaked in the next week or so, so don’t start screaming. Lots of new cleverness. Please keep comments in this thread and don’t get too angry. We wouldn’t like you when you’re angry.
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29/04/2008 at 12:54 Meat Circus says:
Why so many different fonts?
Are you indecisive?
29/04/2008 at 12:56 James says:
No, no. John, Jim, Alec and Kieron all have different fonts. Like WWF Theme Tunes.
(Yes.)
29/04/2008 at 12:57 roryok says:
I like it.
29/04/2008 at 12:57 Colthor says:
The dark-grey-on-black of the “Read: our finest words” and “Respond: to our gibberish” headings on the right isn’t terribly easy to make out.
29/04/2008 at 12:59 Jim Rossignol says:
We did actually try a unified fonts theme and it looked weird and unhappy somehow. More fonts the merrier, it seems.
29/04/2008 at 13:03 phuzz says:
quite like it (but avoid white text on black background please, it hurts my eyeses).
Right now the side bar has decided to position it’s self above all the articles, but it was working five minutes ago so I assume that’ll go away in a moment
29/04/2008 at 13:05 Kieron Gillen says:
Yes, we hope so too.
KG
29/04/2008 at 13:06 Kris says:
Just in case you haven’t noticed, the sidebar is hovering above the main article body in Firefox 3 Beta 4, for me at least.
E: Nvm, I’m late as always.
29/04/2008 at 13:11 Janto says:
yeah, looks like something went wonky with the site’s css, specifically float. Someone hasn’t been closing divs! Once the code bug’s fixed I think it’ll look sweet.
29/04/2008 at 13:14 James says:
Fortunately for RPS, I now provide the comic relief with my amazing ability to randomly delete sections of code and bring the entire site down.
(Fixed.)
@Janto: I just typed over a section of CSS when I was looking at the other screen. Woe is me.
29/04/2008 at 13:17 Lightbulb says:
I like it. As already stated plame grey on dark grey doesn’t actually show up butr other than that its good.
Not sure i like the big speech bubble icon but thats kinda minor. :)
29/04/2008 at 13:17 kevinn says:
At least it’s viewable now in Safari for Windows.
29/04/2008 at 13:18 Lightbulb says:
Hmmm that text seems to have been fixed…
29/04/2008 at 13:20 Mooey Poo says:
I bet Kieron wrote this post.
What price now, for a shallow piece of dignity?
29/04/2008 at 13:21 WinstonWolf says:
I don’t like that text bubble at the end of every article. Too big and obnoxious :(
29/04/2008 at 13:24 Kieron Gillen says:
Mooey: I’m transparent, me.
KG
29/04/2008 at 13:25 Feet says:
This page is broked.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/?page_id=1509
29/04/2008 at 13:26 Pishtaco says:
What happened to the titles of blog entries? I’ve got a feeling that they used to behave like normal links, and you could open them in a new tab. Now they’re acting weird: sometimes the mouse pointer changes to a hand, like it’s a link, but it doesn’t let you open it in tab; sometimes the pointer doesn’t change at all, but you can still go to the page of the entry by double clicking (this is in Firefox 1.5). Or was it always like this?
The huge message bubble is unsightly. The word “comment” appears right next to it, anyway.
29/04/2008 at 13:28 Tunips says:
I use Opera – when I middle click on a post title, it doesn’t open in a new tab any more. And the little pointing hand hangs around after I move off the title.
I like the colours. Feels more refined. Perhaps I shall fetch my smoking jacket before reading tomorrow.
“Opinion away!” captures marvellously the commenting experience.
29/04/2008 at 13:28 Jim Rossignol says:
The headers are poshed up Flash font handlers, possibly a bit buggy.
Poor comment bubble, he’s got so few friends.
29/04/2008 at 13:30 johnsto says:
I like it!
The comment formatting are still a bit ‘meh’ though – ‘specially the gravatar username bit – spice it up! Just make the “username says:” bit bold or something for a start. I’d suggest splitting it into two columns – the left one just wide enough to fit the gravatar at the top, and the right column filling the rest of the space with the ‘username says: (linebreak) blah blah blerugh blah blah blah’.
Also, setting the width height on the gravatar images to 50×50 will stop Firefox shuffling everything around as the page is loading.
29/04/2008 at 13:31 J says:
I hate to bitch since your content is so great but I’m not a fan of the heavy black background.
29/04/2008 at 13:32 James says:
If the comment bubble goes, so do I!
(Flash headings don’t act like normal ones, I will look into an alternative method.)
29/04/2008 at 13:34 sinister agent says:
Sinister black backgrounds and bold, clear themes. I heartily approve.
Also, an oft-misunderstood orange. This pleases me.
29/04/2008 at 13:37 James says:
Please keep spotting bugs and posting them here.
(The comment bubble isn’t a bug. Sod off.)
29/04/2008 at 13:39 Chris Evans says:
Most interesting, I initially support this brave new direction!
29/04/2008 at 13:50 Pishtaco says:
I don’t see the link to a random old article on the right hand side anymore. I miss it; it’s caught my eye quite a few times recently and led me somewhere interesting.
29/04/2008 at 13:52 Alec Meer says:
It’ll be coming back – needs some tinkerage to work, so we’re just waiting to iron out all the wrinkles in the core design first.
29/04/2008 at 13:56 Monkfish says:
I’m liking it, ‘cept for the Flashified headings. I’m already missing the ability to middle-click on them to open an article in another tab (although I’ve found a workaround in middle-clicking the comments speech bubble instead).
One buggette: the dash between the comment and share links is broken in IE (I think it’s missing a semi-colon in t’source). Looks OK in FF and Safari, though.
29/04/2008 at 14:00 James says:
@Monkfish: good call, fixed.
29/04/2008 at 14:01 Citizen Parker says:
Lovely! One more vote for no white text on black backgrounds however. Old coots like me can’t handle that so well.
29/04/2008 at 14:01 James T says:
*wince* ask anyone, less is more in font land. Plus, that way you wouldn’t have to do that little Flash thing to post an obscure font, like you apparently have on the right! And making them a simple text link again would cater to the “I liked to middle-click those headings’ crowd. Win-win-win: the ultimate outcome, just ask Michael Scott!
edit: Jeez, I didn’t even see the ‘feature article’ titles; what possessed you to go with that? Huge clash with every other design element of the site.
Anyway, that aside, things seem nice. You’ll notice that RPS author comments are no longer highlighted, which makes posts like James’ just above look a touch presumptuous (‘who is this James to request such a thing?!’; happens all the time when reading Eurogamer posts…), so you might want to restore that, somehow or other.
A separator or tinted block might be nice to isolate the “comment/share/tags” section of the post so that the reader doesn’t lump the ‘Read the rest of the story’ link in with that stuff and initially skim past it, like I already have a time or two.
When loading a page, I noticed the headings now appear awhile after the main text; what’s up with that? The old way was a lot more informative during a long load — and they do happen.
At least you’re not in IGN “unreadable until the white BG image finally loads after everything else has loaded” territory. They should be shot.
29/04/2008 at 14:04 dwm says:
The magic flash title renderer breaks on my client. (It draws the text in a white box, which — if the text is also white — doesn’t work quite so well.)
But I’m running Firefox Beta 3 on a Linux box, so you might not care that much.
(You could drop the flash not-quite-magic and just use regular font rules, and accept that not everyone will have the desired face. Or you could add an @font-face live-download rule for those browsers that understand it.)
The white small-caps serifs on the top-of-page links are nice.
29/04/2008 at 14:05 Cigol says:
Not a particular fan of the contrast between elements, but it’s not bad by any means (although what prompted the need for a redesign in the first place?). Me don’t like change!
But, I’m still having problems getting the background to show up on my end. Using ‘view background’ (around the title image at the top) I get the error stating that this file is not available or words to that effect with this directory listing given; “/wp-content/themes/rps20/images/header-img.php”
29/04/2008 at 14:05 Rook says:
On the front page, all the boxes are square, but when you click through onto a story all the white boxes have rounded corners. Pick one and stick to it!
29/04/2008 at 14:07 Jim Rossignol says:
Keep posting bugs as you find them, we might not get round to fixing them for a while, mind.
We just wanted a tidier site. There were some functionality changes that you guys might not notice, and so overhauling the visuals at the same time made sense.
29/04/2008 at 14:11 Jim Rossignol says:
Rook: they’re rounded on the front page too.
29/04/2008 at 14:14 Pishtaco says:
They are square while the page is loading, then turn round at the end. The front page takes a long time to load as it messes about with gametrailers stuff, so sometimes you never get the round corners. (In Firefox)
29/04/2008 at 14:14 Rook says:
Oops. It takes a while for the rendering to sort itself out, so I’ve usually clicked through before it’s done that. I think the sharp corners gel better with the rest of the site and it doesn’t take as long to draw….. must…. complain…..
29/04/2008 at 14:17 Cigol says:
I’m sure James (et al) expect complaints, not compliments. This is the Internet after all :D
29/04/2008 at 14:20 Lacero says:
I think this is much better than it used to be. Especially the “opinion away” button.
29/04/2008 at 14:27 Kieron Gillen says:
I too highly approve of the Opinion Away! button.
KG
29/04/2008 at 14:29 Alex says:
The “opinion away!” button is a vast improvement.
I like the rounded corners, it pleases mine eyelets.
I will now unleash this opinion with gusto!
29/04/2008 at 14:37 James G says:
I’m having a few rendering errors whith the ‘comment’ links hovering beneath the bottom of their boxes. However I think thats mainly due to my work having no concept of keeping software up to date and using the most buggy version of Mozilla known to man. (RPS actually crashes the other computer in the lab. I suppose that’ll teach me not to surf the net when I should be working)
29/04/2008 at 14:54 Burgerboy says:
Looks good, but the flash font headings are pretty annoying. Personally I don’t mind the speech bubble :)
Could be a little less left/right margin I guess – on lower res screens (poor ole me on 1024×768) it adds a bit to the vertical scrolling.
Edit: And the opinion away button definitely gets a plus 1 from me.
29/04/2008 at 14:56 Thiefsie says:
I can’t middle click (in firefox) on the article titles to bring them up in a new tab. this is travesty!
29/04/2008 at 15:09 eoy says:
The comment bubble is kinda awful and takes up way too much space. The round breaks between the posts makes every single thing become it’s own section. In my opinion it would be better if there was fewer separate elements.
29/04/2008 at 15:14 understanic says:
The flash headings aren’t a good idea. The page is noticeably slower now. And, whilst we’re on a similar subject, how about a new logo?
edit: and I just got an awesome bug where the “Add your comment” header marched down the page as it reloaded after posting.
29/04/2008 at 15:16 understanic says:
test
edit: and again. Using FF 2 on linux with adblock and noscript (turned off).
29/04/2008 at 15:25 Garreett says:
IE tabs/Open In New Window doesn’t work either.
29/04/2008 at 15:27 Malibu Stacey says:
The “free” tag link in the “Play: indie, mods and webgames” box is now AWOL. I’m lazy & prefer to be able to click that when I want to skive here at work instead of copy & pasting another tag off the site & typing “free” in where needed.
Also the comments shift themselves to the right so they are centred on the page in IE7 once the side bar ends. Can screenshot if needed.
Working fine here. IE7 on XP64 (both fully up to date) with no extraneous toolbars etc.
29/04/2008 at 15:43 Dan Forever says:
I think my only problem with the new design is the lack of ability to right click on a title and open in new tab (or straight middle-click). This wouldn’t be so much of a problem if they opened as a new window (as firefox would catch it and make it a new tab instead), but it opens in the same tab.
In fact I’m not entirely sure I see the point of making the titles flashy, considering they’re all just text anyway…
29/04/2008 at 15:52 Malibu Stacey says:
Let me retract that statement about it working fine for me. I’ve never clicked on the article title before, I always use the “read the rest of this article” link. The article titles fire up a tiny menu & if I select “open in new window” it still opens in the same tab.
29/04/2008 at 16:07 Janek says:
I like the colour scheme. Very State-y.
People have already brought up the horrible comment speech bubble and the wonky Flash title thingies. But I’ll mention them anyway to make myself feel useful.
Opinion away!
29/04/2008 at 16:10 silvrstar says:
It’s good. Good redesign is good.
Horses away!
29/04/2008 at 16:26 Ben Abraham says:
I just tried the Middle-mouse article heading click… the finger is there just TEASING me with it’s Middle Button Un-Clickabilty…
“OPINION AWAY!” – The catchcry of the new Superhero, ‘Mr Opinionated’ (close relative to Captain Obvious).
29/04/2008 at 16:31 Noc says:
Well, it is unquestionably a standards-based, accessible and ergonomic experience.
And the comment bubble is probably the most ergonomic of all.
29/04/2008 at 16:34 lungfish says:
Nothing much to point at beyond everyone else’s posts, generally nice redesign, ‘Opinion away!’ is just genius, comment balloons not so.
29/04/2008 at 16:35 Marcin says:
Apart from the flashified fonts disabling middle click, I like it.
29/04/2008 at 16:39 Shadrach says:
Bugger, your lovely site no longer works in my Opera (9.5 beta though.) Enabling cookies (but why?!) got the text to show but the images are gone. Image properties show “UNKNOWN_STRING_16060″. wtf?
29/04/2008 at 16:45 Alex says:
Whose ‘bizarro’ version is known as The Bleeding Obvious!
29/04/2008 at 16:54 KindredPhantom says:
All in all a good redesign, good job James. I hope they pay you well. :P
29/04/2008 at 17:39 Robert Seddon says:
For the people having trouble with the Flash titles: running Firefox with Flashblock, I got regular HTML post title links (presumably the fallback), so if you’ve a way of disabling Flash client-side, try that.
29/04/2008 at 17:42 James says:
I get paid in people complaining about my work over the Internet (no, this is part of my degree, and is done gratis.)
I’m sure based on the four or more comments about the Flash headings that they’ll get killed (it only takes three negative comments to get things irreversibly changed guys!).
Speech bubble will be replaced with Janek’s head on a pike.
29/04/2008 at 17:50 James says:
I have re-added this.
Also, editor comments are now more visible.
29/04/2008 at 18:15 unclebulgaria says:
Headlines randomly appear (or do not!) in Opera when scrolling quickly. Headlines previously present vanish and vice-versa.
29/04/2008 at 18:16 Jim Rossignol says:
We would *love* to be able to pay James. Despite the adverts, we really don’t make enough to pay anyone anything. RPS is done for free by all concerned. More on this soon.
29/04/2008 at 19:28 Mike says:
James, your discovery of sexy fonts continues to astound me.
29/04/2008 at 19:40 Moorkh says:
I like it.
…that is, I would, if website content didn’t get pushed all the way to the bottom below the lower end of the sidebar. It still doesn’t look bad, just highly irritating.
29/04/2008 at 21:21 KindredPhantom says:
Do you pay him by “other” means. Including John’s mum?
I like the highlighting the RPS overlords and important people get, it makes it easier to skip to the important comments.
Also a suggestion, how about links on the articles to the previous article posted before the current and the article posted after the current one, it would make it easier to navigate.
29/04/2008 at 21:22 Matt says:
The new fonts are nice, once I finally figured out that there were any (flashblock was doing its job and blocking them mercilessly).
If you can, you might want to decrease font size on the non-flashified headline text (the stuff sIFR covers up nicely). It’s much larger than the sIRFed text.
29/04/2008 at 21:40 Mouses says:
>I’m sure based on the four or more comments about the Flash headings that they’ll get killed (it only takes three negative comments to get things irreversibly changed guys!).
That’s great, thanks! (I don’t like them either, so I’ll add 1 positive comment in the other direction)
Only 3 comments huh, how about this:
RPS sucks with no free chocolate coming out of the screen
RPS sucks with no free chocolate coming out of the screen
RPS sucks with no free chocolate coming out of the screen
29/04/2008 at 22:28 ysbreker says:
you know there’s a new sIFR version out? sIFR3? It doesn’t fix the middle click problem (it can’t be fixed anyway :( ) But it does fix a boatload of other bugs and issues.
Oh and the google tracking script goes at the very end of the page source, right above the [/body]-tag ;)
(Sorry, I just had to peak at the sourcecode.)
Hate to say it but I’m not exactly a fan of the speech bubble either :/ It sticks out too much and doesn’t really fit in the rest of the site design. Maybe if it was a bit smaller?
29/04/2008 at 23:28 whitebrice says:
Don’t think this is part of the redesign, and I hope this isn’t considered nitpicking, but up at the top it says “Dinner with Ron Humble” when I think it should say “Rod Humble,” shouldn’t it?
29/04/2008 at 23:59 Ben Abraham says:
Hey, I like the new special highlighting of the editors comments. A good idea indeed, and long overdue.
30/04/2008 at 01:27 James T says:
…They were always outlined, Ben.
30/04/2008 at 01:59 MeestaNob! says:
I reckon the new look is good, but PLEASE bring back middle mouse button clickable news headers. I like to load multiple tabs of RPS goodness before I begin reading.
Pretty please.
PLEASE.
WITH SUGAR ON TOP.
30/04/2008 at 03:50 James T says:
Hey guys, did there used to be a ‘preview post’ feature? I don’t recall (how quickly we forget!) but now would be a good time to include one. Hacking away at one’s post after the fact to iron out any typos/HTML errors is a bit crude.
edit: Oh, and I just got a ‘You are posting comments too quickly’ error on the Crysis thread. Actually saying what constitutes ‘too quickly’ would be nice. 10 seconds, 30, a minute, five?…
30/04/2008 at 04:53 devlocke says:
Another vote for killing the comments bubble, here. I think what’s throwing me off is that it’s oval. Every other design-element on the site is squared/rectangular. Sure, the rounded corners are rounded, but they’re rounded corners on big rectangles. There’s nothing sphere-like at all on the entire site except for those comment bubbles. Make them smaller and squared and it might look better.
Other than that, it looks fine, though the rounded corners seem to add nothing but a bit of delay in how long it takes to load. And the front page seems to take a second or two to load now, when it didn’t before.
I’m not actually complaining in any real sense because you you could go with a feces-and-semen theme that was filled with brokenness, and I’d just learn to block out the visuals for the good readin’. It’s your site, do what you want with it, as long as you keep posting fun text. :)
30/04/2008 at 07:49 Jarmo says:
A couple of technical quibbles.
1) The new site layout does not work very well with Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6.0 (in widespread corporate use). The actual posts are shown below everything else on the page. I have to scroll down three screenfuls before getting to the first post. There’s just a large, empty, dark grey space under the three picture linked posts at the top of the page.
Also, there’s a narrow, vertical, text-background-coloured sharp-cornered bar on the right side of the round-cornered post blocks.
2) The contrast between the dark site background and the light post text blocks is too great. It makes the site hard to look at, as if a flashlight was shining into my eyes while trying to read. I feel like squinting all the time. I don’t mean this as an aesthetic critisism, but purely an ergonomic one. The previous background colour did not have an effect like this.
The effect is not so bad in the beginning of the page, when there is stuff on the right, but delving further into the comments leaves one with wide dark margins on both sides of the text. I don’t even have the browser window maximised. My screen resolution is 1600×1200.
Thanks for actively improving the site! It’s always a good sign, although it’s content over form for me every time so I don’t care so much about how the site look like as long as it’s reasonably usable. How’s that for a run-on sentence?
About the speech bubble graphic: Kieron is a comic book writer. Surely this alone is reason enough to keep it? Let there be a small pictorial connection between the two entertainment media on this site. Very many gamers also read comics. Also, it’s a very clear symbol for the functionality.
30/04/2008 at 08:03 Satsuz says:
Most of the things I have to say have already been reported repeatedly, so I’ll stick to the (slightly) more unique stuff.
A rounded-corner rectangle speech bubble would be ace, as devlocke may or may not be getting at. I’m pro-bubble myself, but I love improvements that unify the design of things.
In terms of functionality, are you taking requests? I’d really love some sort of mechanism for direct replies between individual comments to be easier to track. Nesting replies with an indent might do it, or perhaps something like that crazy auto-linking thing that the Gawker sites use. This may be blasphemy, but I hate trying to follow the lines of conversation up & down the entire comments thread.
30/04/2008 at 10:59 James says:
The speech bubble is now rectangular and will probably be changed again and again and again.
Numerous other small fixes have been made.
The Flash headings are dead. Resume your middle-clicking, peons.
Adjust your monitor. It shouldn’t matter if I draw insulting pictures of your mother on the screen, it shouldn’t be able to hurt your eyes.
Also keep in mind that I am a lowly serf and must obey the wishes of the hivemind. As such, the site is made to their specification, and some things are x peggles in size, others are colored y and that’s not my fault.
Continue to report bugs.
30/04/2008 at 11:15 Monkfish says:
Yay! I’m in middle-click heaven again. Thankyouverymuch.
30/04/2008 at 12:22 drunkymonkey says:
I love the epic new font on the sidebar.
I like the change, it looks vereh nice!
30/04/2008 at 17:48 Malibu Stacey says:
The link has returned but it doesn’t do exactly what it says on the tin. It links to http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/?page_id=1509 which loads a page giving me a right royal rollicking about RSS feeds (even though I’m not using a feed reader just plain old IE7).
The comments have now resumed their linear off centre march down the page however. Many thanks =)
30/04/2008 at 21:28 Cigol says:
I don’t like to complain but the site is too slow (and locks up my Firefox) when loading pages. It’s as if it’s stuck in some kind of limbo that only ends just as it’s starting to roundify the ‘tables’ on the page. It’s very annoying pwease fix it!
30/04/2008 at 23:34 Satsuz says:
Thank you for the hard work, James. And the results have come oh-so-very quickly. The new bubble is awesome (IMO), and middle-clickery has been restored to the masses.
James = Hero
01/05/2008 at 00:13 unclebulgaria says:
Opera appears re-fixed, many thanks.
Frankly I couldn’t give a toss how it looks as long as the wordage is of the usual high calibre. I started following you lot a good ten years ago in PCG and I just hope you maintain similar high standards here.
01/05/2008 at 07:45 Ben Abraham says:
YAY MIDDLE CLICK!!!
And @ ‘James T’ your Avatar is SEAN MICALEF? Um.. excuse me sir, but did you know you’ve got a Beret on your head?