That website is what we call in the industry “butt-ugly”.
My website has been running for more than 12 years uninterrupted. We’ve done a grand total of 3 complete overhauls in that period, and that’s because we were moving platforms. Any redesigns in between didn’t change the structure, and it made things simpler. I am a huge fan of the two click rule. Even so, after each overhaul I spend about two years playing usher for our regular readers.
Overhauling a site for no good reason is tremendously stupid.
With the old Slate format, you could click a “print” button if you wanted to print an article. You could change the font size and delete images. It was great.
Now, you have to drift around the page a bit to find the print option. A widow pops open that requires you to fill out all kinds of demographic info and then they’ll send you a reprint.
My biggest gripe with Slate is that the comments are only listed newest first. Personally, I find the first hundred comments to be the most useful, and, if they have a couple of thousand comments (not uncommon), you have to load comments, scroll down, load more comments, scroll down, twenty or thirty times. Almost every other site gives you the option of showing oldest first. Why didn’t they fix this when doing their update?
[ol]
[li]Slate is owned by the Washington Post[/li][li]The Washington Post is now owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos[/li][li]Bezos sells Kindles[/li][/ol]
Why cater to your competition? Apple has had that attitude since Day One. What goes around comes around.
All snark aside, but the responsive design for Slate sucks. Looks like they picked some off the shelf code and bastardized the design even more.
One of the advantages of having a bigger phone/phablet is that I can use most normal websites. It can be tricky to bypass the automatic redirect to the mobile version, though.
F’rex, I don’t bother with Tapatalk or any such interpreter - I just use the regular Dope interface with a little zooming. Works great. About the only limit is entering replies much longer than this one.
Hmmm. I do not seem to be able to access comments at all any more. If I click the little icon all i get is a white page that is blank except for the message “Powered by Livefyre” and a little icon.
Actually, I have noticed this on Salon too lately. (I still go there occasionally, though less often since they did their similarly horrible redesign some time ago.) No actual comments appear, just the “Powered by Livefyre” thing. Same thing in Firefox, IE and Chrome. Have the redesigns frightened all their commenters away, or can you only see comments on a mobile device now?
I’ve found, in the past, that comments on sites like Slate and Salon are sometimes invisible if you’re running AdBlock Plus or some other sort of ad-blocking extension.
On Slate now, i can see the comments, although it sometimes takes a god four or five seconds for them to load.
Ok, instead, I’ll get you *finished *with slideshows! Just go to this link, where you can either manually paste a slideshow’s URL and choose how you want to view it. Or even better, drag and drop the “Deslide” link (right after “Bookmarklet:”) into your Bookmarks. Then, if you’re on a site that has a slideshow, just click on that Deslide link in your Bookmarks and it will automatically open the de-slided version of the slideshow you want to view in a new window.
If slideshows annoy you enough that you regularly avoid them even though you were interested in their content, this method can be *immensely *satisfying.
I don’t run AdBlock. In Firefox I run Flashblock, but you can normally see where a Flash element has been blocked (and activate it, if needed, with a click). Anyway, I am not seeing comments in IE or Chrome either, and I do not run any extensions at all with them, just the bog standard, up-to-date browser.
Do you have to be signed in, or something, to see comments? Fuck that!
I usually only read Slate when someone links me, but after seeing this thread title, I figured. . .hey, I’m bored at work! Off to go read some shit on Slate.
Holy crap, that interface is awful. I awkwardly clicked around for a few moments, but then aborted the mission. No, thanks.
Oh Christ, they switched to LIVEFYRE for comments?
“With mobile users making up more and more of our readers, we redesigned the site to make it override all the basic features mobile browsers provide! Even more excitingly, we’ve changed our comments system over to Livefyre, which somehow manages to be even worse than Disqus on mobile devices, so your mobile browser can lock up and crash attempting to load “dynamic comments”!”
SO Livefyre doesn’t work on mobiles either? I was thinking maybe the reason it doesn’t work on my PC was that it was designed for iOS and/or Android, and they no longer care about us dinosaurs using PCs. But no, it appears it does not work on anything! (The Livefyre stuff does not actually crash my browser, it just does not do its job, it does not actually display any freaking comments!)
Well, it hardly matters. The chances of ever again finding any interesting content on Slate using the new layout (with extra added ugly!) are remote anyway.
