Looks like it, there's mention of drupal in a javascript call near the bottom of the source. Nice clean html too from a quick glance - wonder if this is the same team as did Obama's election site, similar visual style. Good stuff.
Oh, it is very clearly Drupal. That was not the intent of the comment. The intent of the comment was that it is Drupal, and thus Blue State Digital (the BarackObama.com web vendor) was not behind the construction of the site.
I for one like it, I think it does a good job of providing an 'at-a-glance' overview of stories, it fits a good number of stories on one screen (20) and it is suitably uncluttered for my aesthetic tastes. The only thing I would change is have the animation effects a little faster, say 25%, just to increase the 'snappiness' factor a little. A good job well done IMHO.
One of the nice things about traditional newspaper layout is that story placement and size help readers instantly understand the relative importance of each news article. (Of course "importance" is an entirely subjective notion, but you see what I mean.)
Other than the 2-box story at the top-left, having both X and Y axes and same-size boxes makes it difficult to determine what's worth reading and what's not. It would be interesting combine the grid with a Hacker News/Digg-like point system that reordered the stories by popularity.
The fact that you lose access to the Skimmer interface after clicking on a story seems weird, but that's fixable.
Still, I like that they're trying new ideas. And I love having a small photo with each headline.
I see your argument re: the 'importance' of stories - the 'above the fold' placement in print papers is the same idea - but I think, at least in terms of my own reading, that I can judge for myself what the important stories are.
Thinking about it this is one of the top selling points to me of this design. I don't CARE what the editors think is an important story, show me the article summaries and I'LL decide what I want to read about. This system is great because I can quickly scan the stories for those topics I'm interested in (Science, Tech, Business, Politics) and never have to look at sport or fashion or Britney's new tongue piercing etc
But either way, as you say, nice that they're trying out new ideas
I think the point is that the editorial placement of stories is relieving you of a burden, not telling you what to think. It's like the ordering of stories on the HN front page -- to say "I don't CARE what other HN readers think; I want to go through each one and decide for myself" is to miss an extra dimension, somewhat.
this is getting beyond belief, so I'm going to have to support the flaky weird rendering quirks of IE6 (since so many people still use it), IE7, IE7 Compatibility Mode (which seemingly isn't actually compaitible) AND IE8!? And that's hoping that IE8 'standards' mode is reliable enough to lump in with all the real browsers (mozilla,webkit,opera,etc).
Here's a fucking idea to help booster the economy - how about MAKING people upgrade from IE6. BOOM! Hundreds of thousands of web developer (wo)man-hours saved, increasing efficiency across the whole web-based IT sector.
> Here's a fucking idea to help booster the economy - how about MAKING people upgrade from IE6. BOOM! Hundreds of thousands of web developer (wo)man-hours saved, increasing efficiency across the whole web-based IT sector.
Under normal circumstances that might be a good idea. But given the output gap in the economy, the last thing we need would be less work for web developers. If the government wants to stimulate the web-design sector, it should introduce a hundred new rendering engines, each with a slightly different interpretation of the CSS specs, and then give out grants to businesses to make their sites compatible.
ah yes, I see what you mean, didn't fully think it through did I? - I was kind of hoping that all those suddenly free programmer hours would be funnelled into creative programming and start-up ventures, boosting the economy sans government spending...
Another interesting example of the those who view job retention as the means to economic stimulus versus those who view job creation as the prefered means to that end.
I tend to agree with you. Funding make-work projects benefit the workers involved (and tangentially the businesses they buy from), but innovating and spawning whole new companies/industries seems like a better use of our time and effort.
Kierkegaard had some interesting views on this very subject, that a belief system such as Christianity requires a greater life involvement than the common 'Sunday Christianity' of 30 years ago. I think now we find a larger number of 'genuine believers' whereas 30 or more years ago people went to Church because that was the thing you do. Now, as people have a greater freedom to NOT go, so the remaining attendees probably become more devoted. A kind of evolutionary process, where the selection method is self-selection of attendance based upon initial belief.
As a rationalist/atheist/whateverlabel of course I'm not sure I'm altogether comfortable with the rapid increase in religious adherence in recent years but that's a different discussion.
That's rather unfair I feel since being good at technical creation doesn't necessarily mean good at communication. How many novelists are going to write you a version of VOIP in 1987?? Come on, there's genuine discussion to be had here but it doesn't revolve around his rather flaky prose style - it's not as though we couldn't UNDERSTAND him!
It's not a problem if he works with someone else who has the social skills and prose style to look good to VCs...
The impression you give of yourself when looking for funding is as important as your idea.
as a PHP and ruby programmer (these are my two primary languages) I have to say I agree completely with your comments, you express perfectly a nagging thought that's been, well, nagging for quite some time now. I am very interested to know which you think are better languages that a young programmer might learn next that avoids these pitfalls whilst still retaining the 'practicality' of PHP & ruby for 'getting things done'
As somebody who did lots of Perl for many years, spare yourself the pain, and do Python.
That said, Ruby is still my 'favorite' language -- it's just so much fun to code. But the libraries, and frankly horrible interpreter, have caused me to chuck it out the window for my company. The speed actually isn't the big problem -- it's the long-term maintainability and flexibility.
an interesting read but one thing I didn't understand, how is one meant to save the plaintext username & password client side (so as to be able to send them with each request) without putting them in a cookie or requiring that the user's browser is set to 'remember this password' - anyone got any ideas?
In theory by using a cookie which can be verified by any server, but which can only be generated with the user's password (which is never stored in clear text).
In my experience, the browser doesn't reliably send the username and password with each request so you get a bunch of re-queries. Cookies don't have that problem, they're always sent.
At least, that's what I saw on the intranet site I built, switched to authenticating with a login page and cookies instead because of it.
that's because 'm' is used for marquee, which allows both rectangular and elliptical as well as single pixel column (vertical and horizontal) selections.
'v' is used because 'm' is already taken and 'v' does make sense for the moVe command, especially if you stress the second syllable
indeed, corporations are in legal terms considered with legal equivalence to an individual, and a public traded company is legally bound to maximise shareholder profit, we have basically created a legal psychopath, they're (the board, ceo etc) legally bound to do anything within the law to generate profit/growth. As you say, hardly surprising that companies with mottos like 'do no evil' end up censoring bloggers in the PR of China.
very impressed, tried a variety of search terms and got not only what I was expecting but also other hits that were keyword equivalent. ok fair enough it's a little less responsive than google ;o) but I'm guessing you don't have a spare $50 billion to play with! (jk - the speed is fine btw). The thing that needs most attention (imho) is the design, whilst there are good things (the layout of the search results, especially of 'wide' keywords like 'ruby' or 'augustus') I'm less of a fan of the use of red - in design terms red is an emotive, passionate colour, I would recommend perhaps a blue which usually represents safety, security and trust (look at bank colour schemes). You might alos consider green or grey. The red sets me on edge. Love the use of larger fonts sizes, excellent - should be popular with the age > 25 crowd.
All in all very impressed, I wish you the very best of luck and have bookmarked and will continue to use. (Remember to keep Hacker News updated with any new developments!).
