What The Hell's Going On With This Redesign?

As you surely notice looking around the site, there's some massive design changes going on. (You'll notice that it looks suspiciously similar to Gawker.) We're not exactly sure how this is all gonna work either, and we're working through it ourselves, but let's try to explain what's going on and then you can tell us how much you hate it.

First off, if you've always wondered which posts Rick Chandler wrote, you're gonna find out: There's little bylines to the side, along with the most recent comment. We figure you already suspected which ones he wrote anyway. This is a minor change, and it'll be kind of fun.

Second, and larger, we're gonna have little Quicklinks, short one-hits. We're doing this to cut down on the number of linkdumps. We're keeping Blogdome, for now, but we're losing the afternoon Leftovers. We suspect this won't be a big problem; short information delivered in a zippy fashion and sending people to other blogs helps everybody, and it's also an easy cheap place for new comments.

Third, and the biggest issue, is that the photos are running smaller on the front page. On the actual post page, they'll still run huge, but they're thumbnailing on the front. (Not all the time. Just more often than before.) Sometimes this will lead to one-paragraph hits on the front page with a link to the full post, and sometimes it won't. We're kind of working this out as we go; we've always liked long posts on the front page, and this design makes that more difficult. But we'll see.

Honestly, we're not sure whether these are good changes or not. (We appreciate the notion behind some of them, but they weren't inherently our idea.) But we're trying to separate which changes are scary because they're new and which changes are scary because they're dumb. So — not that we needed to tell you this — please let us know in the comments and at [email protected] what you think. (It never hurts, if something looks particularly bizarre, to include your browser, operating system and even a screenshot of any problems.) We can take it.

So here goes.