New Design

by  Alex Tabarrok

We have now successfully moved from Typepad to WordPress; most of the kinks of the move and the new design appear to have been worked out. Here is the place to report, however, any remaining issues that you may be experiencing. By the way, if you are interested in moving your own blog, see here.

Comments

dearieme

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It's uglier than the old one.

conchis

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There are still some old posts which seem to have been lost (e.g. this one) as well as a number of missing comments from older posts (e.g. here and elsewhere).

Miles

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I like the layout, but it takes significantly longer to load than it used to. I'm using chrome, and I can't click on links until the whole page is loaded (I don't think it used to do this).

Damian

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HI Alex - the website still hangs - I watched it more closely, and it hangs a bit creating the "Tweet" buttons, and then most of the hanging occurs when displaying the numbers next to the tweet button on the bottom of the posts. I tried to adblock those tweet boxes but that has not worked yet

Damian

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So I disabled the Web of Trust extension in chrome, and it seems to have improved performance markedly...

Damian

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And Ad-Block helped too - disabling both Ad-BLock and WoT markedly quickened loading time.

Robbie

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How about a link to the previous and next posts at the top of the page?

Linda

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What dearieme said. Please consider changing the color scheme! The red/white/blue/black of the posts and comments clashes miserably with the green of the "masthead" and sidebar heds.

Eivind

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It's ugly as sin - even worse than the old one. It is absolutely overflowing with errors (this page, for example, has a whopping 248 errors and 392 warnings, for a total of well over 600 mistakes in the HTML alone. (try to paste the url of the page into http://validator.w3.org )

It's also significantly -slower- than the old one. And significant features, such as auto-discoverable RSS-feeds are missing.

Overall, a total loss. The content of marginalrevolution is worth reading, but the presentation and packaging just went from bad to worse.

Is there anyone who thinks this was an improvement ? If so, who ?

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Eivind, thanks for your feedback.

The majority of the errors you've pointed out are a result of the links Amazon generates for the books that you see in the sidebar, so it seems that Amazon ignore W3C standards. Many of the others are small syntax errors in the HTML, which I'm happy to fix. Leading spaces in quoted areas of the HTML are poor form, but shouldn't affect site load time or functionality.

I'm unable to reproduce the slow load times that others are experiencing. I've enabled pretty strong caching for the site that gives the site a PageSpeed score of 76. That means there's room for improvement, notably in optimizing javascript, which is what seems to be causing the hang problems that some folks area experiencing with the Facebook and Twitter buttons. I've already reduced redundant javascript quite a bit, but things can optimized further.

If you're not seeing RSS feeds, this is something else I'm unable to reproduce. Firefox and Safari are seeing the RSS feed automatically and the extension I use in Chrome for doing the same thing--Chrome doesn't do this out of the box--is seeing the feed as well.

Design issues are up to Tyler & Alex to work out with their designer. I'm glad to implement whatever look and feel they all decide on.

Please keep giving feedback on the site!

michael

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I adjusted to the new design quite quickly, and there are some nice features like each post's title is now the permalink, rather than having to find and hit the "permalink" text as before.

My one gripe is the masthead/header/banner image is *two different colors*. The bit on the right is slightly bluer than the bit on the left (where the title text is). This difference is virtually unnoticeable on many setups, but a couple of the computers I use (Macs with calibrated monitors) show the difference quite glaringly. If you look at the screenshot in a competent image editor it can show you the RGB values for each side, and they're different: the lefthand color is sRGB(0.09,0.73,0.55) and the righthand color is sRGB(0.06,0.73,0.55).

Tom

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It would be nice to have an option not to nest the comments.
This make coming back later easier.

Right Wing-nut

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VERY nice. Nested comments make return reading almost impossible.

tofias

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But is it Fireball proof?

BM

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Nice to see the 'under the fold' posts again. The site looks very good.

Can you tell us if site search is run buy Google? Is there any way to use operators like or/and, +/-, etc or their equivalents here? Because it'd be great to be able to do more refined and specific searching.

Chris D

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I assume y'all had your reasons for doing this, but it's just as well I read by RSS and only occasionally read or participate in comments: the re-design is unfortunately less pleasant to use.

Varun Rao

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Tyler, Alex,

Why not put up the corpus of text that was generated during this transfer up on bit torrent? It'll be interesting to datamine, and potentially valuable as a record of these times, and even serve as distributed backup!

-V

rhodium

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It is slow to load on Safari (5.0.4), 20b seconds, but not firefox (4.0) using OSX 10.5.8. Oddly, an older G4 laptop does fine with this page. I have not seen this behavior elsewhere.

G.A.M.

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In posts that had below-the-fold text, the above-the-fold text is now missing. e.g. this post on Apocalypto used to explain that the quoted text was Bryan Caplan's. Now that information has disappeared.

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This is being fixed currently.

thehova

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I miss the google search feature on the old site.

I like the site design and color scheme.

Mike

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When you navigate to a web page, you normally hear one clicking sound as the browser switches URLs. On your page it clicks about 30 times. Sounds like a machinegun.

Colors are OK, but could use some slight tweeks.

Text is much more clear.

Thank God - no more captcha!

I like the nested comments.

Mike

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I get a 404 error every time I post a comment from my Droid, but when I hit "back" the comment is always there.

Andrew

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How much faster/easier is it for you to post?

I had a work-related blog that I stopped using because it was too many clicks to post.

Andrew

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My comments aren't there until I hit refresh.

B.B.

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I am not clear on what motivated the switch?

Was it worth the switch?

If someone were starting a fresh blog, which service would recommend for a beginner?

Dan Weber

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Each comment should have a permalink.

Actually, each comment already has a permalink, but I have to go into the source and paste things together to link to an individual comment. A tiny little "LINK" anchor (or maybe on the timestamp) would let us refer to specific comments with more ease.

Bob Montgomery

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I don't mind the new design; it's just as clean and simple as the old and that's good enough for me.

Permalinks to comments would be good, and I think nested comments are pretty dumb in general.

Otherwise, the transition has been pretty seamless for me. ;)

samuel

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TvJKAA http://dy5Ndo9BsL1vpVv5kqsUh.com

samuel

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2WRo5p http://dy5Ndo9BsL1vpVv5kqsUh.com

Flyttefirma

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I actually like the design really much, it is simple yet very easy to find your way around the website!
If i could give it stars it would get 4/5.

Flyttefirma Sjælland

Flyttefirma

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Simpel and Easy to use.

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