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Design: How Things Look
We're going after cleaner layouts that are easy to scan. We're still working out a few IE issues with the new designs. By the way, I take the screenshots on my development system so don't expect their content to make any sense: nonsense is easier to generate than sense (watch some TV or have a look at politics if you don't believe me) so that's what I do when I'm building and testing things. Ratings: What You Think of ThingsWe dropped the click here to rate stuff. The idea behind that was to get more honest ratings rather than having people give things the same rating as everyone else. We had good intentions but it was more hassle than it was worth so away it went. The thumbs are a pretty common approach for short-lived things like comments so we dropped the star ratings on comments in favor of thumbs. uViews also have thumb ratings now. We like the star ratings on uViews so we kept those around. The truthfulness rating was another good intention that didn't work out so well when reality got involved; so, we got rid of truthfulness ratings in favor of thumbs. We left the star ratings on everything else but that might change in the future. Search: How You Find ThingsWe did a bit of work on how you use the search system. We don't have basic and advanced search anymore, we just have one search that starts simple and then offers some simple refinement options. You start with two things when you want to search:
And then we give you a couple ways to narrow or expand the search:
The search result listings are the same as before. Miscellaneous: Other ThingsYou might notice a new box in the left sidebar. This new Citizen Profile box just shows you a little bit of information about a random registered user and a couple of search links for users. There was only one little change in the CMS this time. We reversed the order of the keyword pages: you pick your sections first and then add extra keywords after that. The intent is to give you some keywords to start with so that it will be easier to add some more. Updated Updates, Oh My! We also fix a few problems with the search form under IE. A bit of Googling and guess work sorted things out. IE6 does some odd things when rendering
We do our best to support IE and we will continue to do so — we're here to serve and a lot of people use IE — but it would be nice if Microsoft made it easier. Comments
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We also added thumbs-up/thumbs-down ratings for a couple things. The thumbs are, more or less, an indication of whether or nor you recommend something to other people.
We were having some issues with the horizontal navigation tabs along the top of the pages under IE. An investigation pointed the blame at the speech balloons in the right sidebar; the balloons used to be generated by some JavaScript and it looked like the balloons and the tabs were fighting each other. We solved this by going old-school with the speech balloons; converting them to 1999 style tables seemed to fix things. Alas, this turned out not to be the case, the real problem with the tabs is something to do with some IE6 installations; Ron's IE6 flickers a lot when his mouse pointer goes over the tabs but mine doesn't. Oh well, the speech balloon JavaScript was slow and unnecessary so we're better off without it.
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