Josh says ‘it’s done’.
Bollocks more like.
Since when was a website ever done? This website, blog, wiki or whatever it is now or turns into WILL NEVER BE DONE :)
Done means finished, completed, never to be touched again. The web isn’t like that.
What Josh’s post seems to overlook is that the web is an iterative medium, a moving feast, a job never done, a medium and world fundamentally broken, but in a nice way. He’s right this new website is partially done, or started, but if we did think it was DONE with a capital D then we’d be done for sure.
Both the online steamrollers that are Amazon and Google and the nimble online-born-and-bred projects like Threadless or Last.fm roll out new features constantly on their online properties, some big fireworky launches, many without so much as a whisper – ding! A new button where there wasn’t one before. Oooh? I wonder what that does…and so the feature is tested, measured, monitored, improved, and implemented permanently or culled. Agile. Always moving towards a better outcome, a better rating or measurement, a better better. Darwinism on digital steroids. Business as the speed of the internet.
Just like this website isn’t going to be launched, it’s also never going to be finished. (Cue cries from Trevor, Matt, Telmo, Jenni, and probably a rant from Josh..).
Sorry, but that’s the way it is.
11 Comments
looking really smart already, the never-finished ethic is admirable as well.
One little tweak I’d recc is allowing to subscribe to comments by email, encourages debate from people who already left a comment
totally agree kelvin – thanks for the suggestion of comment subscription by email. we’re meeting in a few weeks once the site’s bedded in, and this will be on my list thanks to you!
if anyone has a favourite wordpress plugin (co-comment? disgus? other?) then all suggestions gratefully received.
Talking of comments, I spotted this afternoon that the “recent comments” list over to your (top) left was a bit missing but it’s all fixed now.
An RSS feed for comments is scheduled to be added in the future but email is an interesting idea. Do people still like getting email alerts for stuff?
RSS subscription is a rather glaring omission – and I’d like to think that we would offer subscription by email as a matter of course. I like the way http://www.disambiguity.com/ handles it – clean, clear Maybe a bit discreet?) and easily implemented through feedburner.
Cool to Jenni’s point – I’m keeping a list of proposed tweaks and next developments, maybe you guys can do the same?
@Trevor – I really like subscribing to one-off comment threads when I submit a comment but am unlikely to return to that blog post again.
One other thing that this charming little discussion has made me realise is that the usability of the comments, in particular quickly scanning and seeing who it is that’s saying what, isn’t A1 – it sort of looks like Jenni’s comment is the one above her name, not the one below.
there should be more spacing between each entry and where did this doted line business come from. PSD’s have solid strokes…
Yes, it’s on the infinite list of things to be fixed.
Guys
From one “social media” luvvie to a bunch of others, I’ve got to say…I love the new look and love the new blog.
The chanegable author home page is a great idea!
Hope we will be able to catch up sometime in the future.
Paul
Loving the new website – the whole rebranding has worked really well and it’s great to see a consistent message coming out of NM. Cool stuff. I really like the way the homepage background image is of the person who last made a blog post. Lovely!
I did notice a few things that look strange though, and as this seems to have become a feedback conversation, I thought I’d add them here:
1) Top navigation has no text backup if images are switched off which isn’t very good for usability. Maybe use an image replacement technique that allows real text to show “through” if images are off? Also, if you add “outline:none” to the anchors, this will stop Firefox < v2 from making a really long dotted line right across the page as it looks very strange.
2) I noticed a strange combination of dotted and solid lines separating comments / blog lists and the spacing is not consistent which makes it hard to follow who has said what.
3) When pages load, the 3 blue bars above the footer appear at the top of the page, then get shunted to the bottom when the page has loaded. I guess this is a float clearing issue?
4) The comment form seems to have missed its makeover: Send in Nicky Hambleton-Jones! single text fields are unstyled and don’t match textareas. I think the textarea (where I’m typing right now) is too light, I can barely read it. :Lastly, I’m not sure if you made a choice to leave buttons unstyled, but they do look a little at odds with the rest of the site.
I’m really looking forward to seeing how you evolve the site. Keep up the good work! :-)
Thanks for the comments Matt. Rest assured that all of those bugs (and many many more) are already queued up to be fixed.
They’ll also be available in a limited edition 6 CD box set.
Hi again — sorry to be a pain, but I think there’s something a bit broken in your monthly archiving. If I select, say, November, I only get a few posts, yet I know there are more than what is shown. I think mistakeny that the standard previous/next entries links have been removed from the wordpress template making it impossible to cycle through all the entries. I could only find this post again by going in through the Categories archive.
I also noticed that pretty much all the content from the old NM blog is missing. This is a real shame as there was some really good stuff in there. Will you be adding this stuff back in?