Man this is getting really time consuming! You guys have had a LOT of entries so far. I'm enjoying seeing them, but I really need to apologize for not giving as detailed of a critique to some entries as to others. There are a number of really great designs that I've seen so far. 3-4 that are good enough to win almost unchanged. But the contest is still wide open.

To address some points made so far: the menu structure is one of the trickiest things to do. I'm open to any ideas for moving them. For javascript trickery. As long as it's backwards compatible, I'll consider any idea. Unfortunately some items in the left hand menu MUST remain visible on the page somewhere. The Sections list. The preferences. And the Vendors & Services boxes. Other boxes can be collapsed, submenued, hidden or whatever, but I think it pretty important that designs have space for login/user info (eg, the 'User' menu in the left hand side). As well the sections list, and biz partnership stuff that needs visibility.

One reader yesterday made a great comment that some designs are using to much green, and I think thats the key. Slashdot's green is a dominating color. When used sparingly (read:todays skin) I think it works very well. Many templates go overboard and lose it.

The best designs typically are dropping the top icons from the upper right hand corner. This is fine. That space can be better utilized for user preferences, user login boxes, search boxes etc. I totally agree with that assesement. But if you start doing zany stuff, it becomes more important to show logged in as well as logged out skins. Otherwise one or the other has a big hole to deal with.

Another person made comment about the 'fairness' of my journal entries. As I explained in the original contest, my concern is not fairness, but rather the best looking Slashdot possible. If someone totally nips another design, that won't stand, but I think everyone should be reading every comment I make here and tweaking their designs where appropriate.

Again what follows is a few entries worth sharing. I apologize for being behind, but at this point I've had nearly a hundred designs, and many hundreds of emails to read and reply to. These entries once again are not necessarily the 'best'. They aren't necessarily winners or losers. But they have elements that I think are worth sharing for some reason or another.

first up is Nathan Apple. His design has very clean left and right sides that I think work really well. Also worth noting is that MANY designs have tried to add another shade of light green to Slashdot, but this shade of light green I think works really well. I think ultimately his articles are a bit generic. I've said this many times, but once you scroll down, this could be any web site. It doesn't look uniquely like Slashdot except perhaps for the topic icons. I appreciate that the header is a totally new redesign, but it just doesn't work for me. I'm all for white space, but Slashdot has a LOT of stuff in the left hand menu that could potentially be put in that upper right hand corner.

Helen Nicholson's design needs some work, but has some cool elements. Her logo has energy, and the graphics she's working with look really nice. Unfortunately they don't seem to line up for me- font dependency issues make them look a little low for me. I suspect that this might be a tricky problem to solve. I think the use of grey on the articles sorta makes it look less like Slashdot, and the dept line is unreadably small on my screen. Putting the topic icons in boxes solves the must-be-on-white problem, but it doesn't look very good. No padding makes it crowded. Also the abbreviated articles get lost. Mostly I share this design to show you the slashboxes, which look quite nice- if only the notches lined up with the text properly... but man, CSS sucks for that sort of thing.

Agnar Ødegård's design does a LOT of interesting things with menus. He puts the user menu up top. The stories menu into tabs. The design itself doesn't light me on fire, but creative thinking about the large volume of navigational elements we have here does.

Marko Mrdjenovic gets mad props for completeness. His design includes articles, comments, the index etc. His header is great, but he silly expanding topic icon thing serves no purpose. I don't care for the use of /. as a bullet point. The color coding in the comments thing is something we've actually talked about quite extensively. It's something we very well may do when we revise the moderation system. Again I don't care for the faded light green. It seems really soft to me somehow, but this is a fantastic design. Very well done.

Next up we have Stefan Lesser's design. I share this one because he does interesting things with both the menu and the article. Like many designs, he moves the menus up top (see my notes above for caveats about this decision). All in all, his system works quite nicely. I think the header is a little dull, but it's clean. The really interesting thing is the totally different take on the layout of articles. I mean. I don't know that it's what I want, but it's very cool. Also, he does something that many of our designers do by making italics in articles be seperatedy for readability. I'm unconvinced on if this is a good idea or not, but it is worth considering. His abbreviated articles are cool. His slashboxes are cool. All in all, this is just a great entry.

Shane's entry is clean and stylish. I kinda like the comic bookish choice of font for the slogan. The gradients behind the article title works really well. Personally I think he is over using the curve- it's on titles, slashboxes, menu headers, the corners of the main frame, and also around the topic icons (see other notes on topic icons mentioned repeatedly above). His abbreviated articles look to be totally unaltered from Slashdot today. I assume he's doing some javascript foo on the menu on the left, but it's not apparent to me what that is. All in all tho, in terms of a design that is purely cosmetic and changes very little functionally, this is a good one.

(Still several to go). Next up Michael Milligan's design tries lots of stuff with varying degrees of success. His topic icons in the header just don't work. I don't care for the square around the topic icons in the article. The gradiants mostly look pretty good (although the block of grey between the tops of the menu and slashboxes, and header look a bit out of place to me. I'd use the white gradient all accross. He is trying zany stuff here with expanding/contracting articles and menus. He also has provided space for a user menu atop the page. His footer is realtively dull. It's just today's footer, with a different color and no search b ox. The gradient above the very last menu spans outside the white box. I think it's worth noting that you aren't required to put the black border around Slashdot. I think this design would work good without the black edges in the main space- keeping the black up top and at the bottom works to bookend the page (as well as contain the advertising atop the page) but this design (like a lot of them I've seen) seems to want to keep the black edge so much, that something is sacrificed. All in all this one is a nice entry, but it would take a lot of work to be seriously considered. The parts are there, they just don't all fit together right.

Andy Peatling's design has many nice elements. The diagonal lines in the header and login space. I totally dig the subtle /. embedded into the left hand menu. I almost universally dislike the use of /. as an iconographic abbreviation of slashdot- but in that spot, it is subtle, and honestly totally perfect. His expanding topic icon mojo at the top of the page is just silly and I think that space is being under utilized. He does the thing where he makes italics in articles be blockquote style indentions. I'm just not sure how I feel about that. It might or might not work. For readability it might work. But it might just be a mess. I really can't decide. I'm reading comments in these so feel free to share opinions since a lot of designs try this. His menu on the left ads a lot of white space, making it Waaaay to long. Some expanding/contracting javascript mojo would help that. So would moving some menu bits to the upper right. Normally I don't care for the white on black text bit, but it works in his slashboxes. He also mocked up an article with comments to show how the design would carry through. I think the whole thing works, but I miss slashdot's green. What it really comes down to, is do I want to read slashboxes in white on grey or black on white... same for article headers. I think the color inversion is nice for menus, but harder for huge chunks of text. Choose one and stick with it. But all in all this is a very strong design. Clean. Simple. Well done.

HAZAH! I am through my favorites from tuesday. I still have several entries from wednesday and already a few from today. Comments are once again enabled. Play nicely.

Back again with a few more designs to share. Once again, these designs are shared with you guys to show you what people are submitting, not to show you who is "winning". THe contest is wide open. My comments here are for everyone to better understand what I'm looking for in a winning design... these designs may not be the best entries I've seen, but they have elements that I think are worth commenting on.

Jason's Design is a very strong example of a design that really tries to expand/clarify/simplify the Slashdot of today. His header is solid. The gradiant on the left hand menu is nice. His article layout is solid. The dynamic menu on the left hand side is an improvement on what we have today. I feel that his design has to many shades of green in it. THe slashboxes on the right are a bit dull, and that green titlebar used there (and on the left menu) doesn't quite match). I don't care for the gradiant on the 'slogan' space. I think that a bit more effort could be put into that space to make it look a bit cooler. Also there is no footer to speak of. Now I don't know if at the end of the contest the winner will be a design that breaks with Slashdot a lot, or echos it very strongly. But if I ultimately decide to go with the latter, this design has a lot going for it. Simple. Clean. Readable. Very well done.

Gregory's Design is perhaps even more tightly linked to the design of today. This design is pretty much entirely cosmetic. That is both it's strength and weakness. I like visually how he has made the left hand menu and right hand slash boxes jut a bit outside the main box. I like the look of his abbreviated articles. I don't like th elittle boxes around the footer menu. All in all I think the problem with this design is that it is simply to white. When you scroll down a few times, past the menus and boxes, it is not really visually distinctive. I think this is because his articles, while clean, lack a little pizazz... Ultimately tho, a design like this is very solid, but it makes me wonder why I'd change from what we have to this, since I don't think it breaks much from what we have.

Heath Huffman also changes very little in terms of layout. I share his design because he but some effort into the logo in the upper left hand corner. I think that's a nice look. I'm not sure if it' what I want- a 'newspaper' kinda rubs me in a print-is-dead kind of vibe. But I appreciate the look. The grid behind the articles... the binary behind the topic icons. I could go either way on them, but I appreciate the effort. The green/grey gradient just doesn't work for me.

Michael Johnson's design is still only a mockup, but it is a very strong design. A clean header echos Slashdot of today very strongly. Moving the login box up top is a smart decision. His menu is very solid. His article layout is very clean... perhaps to clean. Maybe green titlebars shadowed instead of the white ones 'carved out'. The real question for him will be how close can he get to this design in CSS. Truthfully this is among my favorite designs I've seen. It is very readable. Very attractive. Where he goes with it will be interesting...

John Reilly's design is another mockup. He shows some interesting stuff. Some of which I'm not sure he can translate to CSS. His design is unique in that he actually seperated the slashbox column outside the main frame of the stories. This is a cool design idea and looks really excellent. Unfortunately the advertisement space must be able to span the width of the browser... so if he were to align his slashbox column just below the ad, it would work technically. I think his logo is cool, but to tall vertically... Since he decided he wanted the menu up top, he chose to move the slogan down into that space. Unfortunately the topic icons are like 100 pixels tall, and his logo is really half that. I think it looks a little odd. He could drop the topic icons, rethink that space somehow, and have a really good base for an entry. It's worth noting that his articles are missing some data bits (dept line for example). But like several other designs we have, it's hard to judge a static mockup in the same way as you would CSS/HTML. I hope he continues to work on this.

Rafael Madeira's design is alas also a jpg. He slightly changes the slashdot shade of green, but I think it might work despite that ;) His design is aesthetically very pleasing. I'm not sure about his Log in box in the upper right hand corner. Like so many of these designs, that topic icon space is a real crutch to deal with. It's not very good on Slashdot today, and making it "Better" is often what is seperating the good entries from the best entries. He submitted several other pngs to demonstrate functionality, but I don't think they matter of my purposes here. He wants functions (Zoom, Fluid etc) that I don't think are that important... especially not given how often the average user would change them. I'm not sure preceisly what he plans to do with his 'sidebar shortcuts'. Since that whole space is user configurable, I think it probably would be best to just leave them there normally. Users who log in can delete/remove/add those boxes. My concern with this design is similiar to many others... if I scrolled down a couple pages, the articles would look generic. I think slashdot's articles today are quite recognizable. The green. The curve. The dept line. The topic icon. I'm not saying any of these elements are necessary, but the layout of these articles is clean... but just white and a very faint grey. I think more could be done there to add some energy to this design.

Phew.

Ok, with that, I have posted to this journal the entries I wish to share up to May 1. I have another dozen or so worth sharing still in the inbox, but I'll save them for later... in the mean time... keep the entries coming...

So a few days ago Chris was in town, and to celebrate we decided to do something stupid. Like put mentos into 2-liters of coke. Fortunately for you, we recorded it for all to share. It's Me, Kathleen, Chris Dibona (former editor here, now Google open source pimp) and Patrick (ScuttleMonkey). It's about 4 minutes long, but watching soda explode like 8 feet in the air is totally worth it I think.

As promised, a few more of the redesign entries that have flown through my inbox are presented here today for you. Once again these are not necessarily the best entries, but rather I'm showing them to you guys more because they have things I think are worth commenting on.

The first design comes from Phil. As he has just one name, I shall assume he is like Cher or Madonna so I should just know him. His design doesn't do much with the header, but he experiments extensively with the menu. Breaking out the sections is a good idea I think. I'm not sure about moving the entire menu structure up top tho- I think it makes the page feel really wide. He uses a pull down menu system which I think has some potential. I'm not sure if instead we should put a pulldown menu on the side. The articles themselves are in newly styled boxes which work pretty well. I'm not sure if I like his abbreviated style- the really light green looks kind of weak against the much stronger greens of the titles and footers of the articles... and when you place 2 articles adjacent, you see that dark green line, then the white spacing, then the dark green bar of the next section. It's a bit much. I don't care for how he abbreviated the articles in the 'science' box. All in all, I think this design is solid, but it would take a lot of work to clean it up to be a true winner.

Jarques "Retro_X" Pretorius's design is only a jpg, so no thoughts on actual implementation. He once again moves the section list up top. Also he moves the seach box. A reasonable design decision. I sorta like how the topic icons look embedded into the center column. It makes them LOOK good... but as with so many designs, those topic icons just don't serve a lot of purpose. This isn't his fault- it's mine. The space populated by those icons was originally intended to house the advertising on Slashdot, but that space turned out not to work since ad styles need to chang so much. I think the left & right sides of this design uses white, light green, and 2 shades of grey as background colors. I think that's just to much. Again, there are a lot of really great ideas in here, but I think it will take work for it to be seriously considered.

Neeld Tanksley's design has a lot going for it. But chief among his design decision was to use to indent italics like a block quote. I think this looks nice, but it doesn't work consistently on Slashdot. Some stories might have 2-3 quotes... sometimes very short. So I think that it wouldn't work reliably, visually. I think the abbreviated article view gets lost here. I like his handling of the icons within the articles. They really look nice above the lighter shade of green, although I suspect some of the drop shadowed icons won't work. THe faded icon thing atop the page looks ok, but as with most designs, they really prove how worthless those icons are. The menu and the slashboxes are allright. Same for the header. There are again, many good ideas here.

Patrick Durst's Design is fully CSSd, and uses some itneresting ideas on teh side menu. I think with some work, hsi menu structure might work really well for Slashdot. Unfortunately I thin kthe rest of hsi design is sort of boring. His abbreviated article view is more interesting than his titlebar view. And the slashboxes on the right hand of the screen are just... well.. squares. Since his implementation is CSS, it's worth noting that his search box in the footer doesn't quite line up right. All in all, the menu on the left hand side is this design's strong suit, nad it's why I share this one with you. This design (as well as a few others today) are addressing our menu clutter problems in different ways. I think that this is a quite successful attempt. The onyl thing that DOESN"T work here is that only one menu stays open. I think we'd want Vendors, Services, and Sections at least open by default. Help, Stories, and About could be contracted by default since those are relatively unncessary for most users. Preferences/Login deserves special treatment.

Next, Adam Marsh's design is only as yet a jpg, but he's definetly trying stuff. The slash design element is carried throug hthe header and sidebar. It looks quite nice. I generally don't like to abbrevviate '/.' in punctuation form, but this design is solid enough to consider it seriously. I don't think the topic icons in the right corner works. Unfortunately this design drops topic icons from the articles entirely. I'm not opposed to that decision, but I do tend to feel like something is lacking. I'm not sure about the use of red for links, but I think it's ok. I've had probably a half dozen designs match slashdot's shade of green with orange. This is a better contrast I think.

the last design for today comes from Peter Lada and i think is one of the coolest we've seen. His handling of articles is elegent. While he doesn't deviate much in the left hand menu, I think it all looks really solid. His header is really minimal and I dig it. I miss the old Coliseo font, but his choice to drop the topic icons and move the search box up top is solid. I like his 'Old Stuff' box, as well as how he handled 'Book Reviews'. This is probably one of my favorite designs in terms of just plain 'Look'. It doesn't deviate very far from today's layout. That might be this particular design's weakness- other designs have gone further with good results.

I have probably 20 more designs in my inbox worth commenting on. But I'll save that for later.

Also, i'm letting readers comment in this journal entry. I've not allowed that before, so please be nice. I have infinite moderator points and have no problem using them in my journal.

updates addressing comments here so everyone reads them:

• I'm not immediately planning on offering multiple skins to readers. You can already do that locally by overriding local CSS. But I think that when a reader comes to 'Slashdot' it should look like 'Slashdot'. If you want to change that personally, go for it. But the official view ought to remain consistent.
• I agree that the topic icons in the top right corner are expendable. They are one of the few elements i nteh current design that are almost if not totally meaningless.
• CSS/DHTML/JAVASCRIPT/ETC. Whatever. Use whatever you like. When it comes time to judge, compatibility will be a factor, so whatever you choose, be careful.
• We are willing to make some changes to the core HTML. We are not willing to make drastic changes unless the idea is really fantastic. So adding a new DIV or something is no problem, but writing hundreds of lines of perl to generate some new data is not likely for the scope of this contest.

As I said in the original story, I woul be posting and commenting on some of the designs as they came in, and posting them into my journal. I have a few of these right now, and I'm posting them so I can give some guidance to everyone on what is good and bad.

I've had probably 15 or so "Real" designs submitted. Half were (ahem) bad or just not at all what I'm looking for. What follows is a couple of them They aren't necessarily the best, but each has a few things about it that I like that i thought was worth sharing to help give everyone guidance.

first I have a design from Sujay Thomas. I like that this design is CSS. I think the handling of the topic icons in the corner is a bit clumsy. I think the margins are a bit excessive. I think the bars on the left and right need a bit of work. But I think the center column is clean, simple and very readable. I don't think that this design will win without some work: i think it might be to minimal for what I'm looking for. It's also a bit high contrast for my tastes.

Next up I have Hallvar Helleseth's design. Now he is missing a lot of navigational elements, and I'm not sure what the 0-1-2 thing is behind the topic icons, but the design itself is a dramatic departure from Slashdot today, and I respect that. He tries something unique with the topic icons. I'm not sure that the earthtone color scheme is quite what I'm looking for, but I give him huge props for going somewhere unique. The 'More Slashdot' button atop the page shows you some ideas for where he is going with navigational elements. I think the left and right sides of the pages need a bit more differentiation, and there are a few missing elements that aren't properly classed, but this is another solid starting point. I like the reflection on the logo.

Dan Theman's Entry is just plain funny.

The final entry I will comment on today is a design from Philip Dhingra. First off, it is worth noting that his entry is a jpg- far from the CSS that I hope to ultimately see winning. His article space is clean and legible. Good choice on the data formatting. Moving the department line is interesting. His handling of the topic icons is unique, and a nice way to get around the limitations the icons present. He loses a few bits of information (story section for example) and explicitly labels the icons- I'd prefer not to label the icons. I want them to visually stand by themselves. I'm not sure about his left hand menu. But hsi choice to put the user information in the upper right hand corner is solid. It makes excellent use of the space. Likewise, his clean handling on the right of the slashboxes is really cool. Of the designs presented today, this is the most developed in terms of "Design" but the least developed in terms of "CSS". But I can't wait to see where this one goes.

a few random notes

so far nobody has tried a CSS expanding/contracting menu for the left hand side. Given the huge amount of space the menu takes up, I'm kind of surprised.

WRT the topic icons at the TOP of the page- I think that those are expendable.

WRT topic icons, tons of people suggested automated ways of converting them to pngs and such. Others suggested contsts seperate from this one to convert them. I'm open to anything, but as I stated originally, I think working with the icons we have is the most sane plan. But all my rules are flexibile here.

Most of the designs so far have really shrunk down the logo in the top left. I think thats fair: it's pretty huge right now and probably could use a trimming. Get the readers to the articles faster.

I have a lot more designs in my inbox that I plan to post here and comment on during the upcoming days.

April Fools is probably my favorite day to post on Slashdot every year. So many entertaining stories to choose from, and a steady flow of humorless angry users irate that their precious Slashdot is not taking the world seriously enough.

The pretty pink april fools day theme was my idea, but implemented by kathleen. The ponies thing was all her. As was some of the wordings, as well as the link to cute overload- a site that got pretty well slashdotted. Sorry about that.

the most interesting part of the day was the things that occured in the tagging system. We'll get some really good data out of the whole thing. Most of the tagging was done in good humor (although some users were understandably offended). But the system can only get better with the data we collect here.

I leave for LinuxWorld in like 6 hours. If you're going to be in Boston for the show, much of Slashteam will be in some sort of lounge area on the show floor tuesday. I think we're also there a fair bit on thursday. Wednesday is mostly sourceforge folks.

I always have mixed feelings on LWCE. I'm not a huge fan of travel in the first place. This year OSTG has a booth for the company which I'm expected to sit in for much of the show. It's been several years since I did this. It's not that it's hard- we just sit and work in a public place instead of a private one. Sometimes users pester us, but most folks are really cool.

I believe there will be wireless net access, so you're welcome to show up and just hang for a bit. We'll be the ones who's skin is pealing off from the flourescent lighting.

So I work in a little armpit town called Dexter. It's outside of Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan. A great college town, with good food, concerts etc. Fantastic place to live. Dexter is a bit different. Like most of America, A2 is expanding and gobbling up the towns around it. Dexter, just a few decades ago was a little farm town. Now it is this wierd hybrid of people who bought 1 acre lot McMansions to escape the "City", and locals who have lived here for decades.

Today I finally found the perfect way to represent my town. This Trailer Hitch perfectly sums up Dexter. It was photographed just outside our office door. It raises many questions- not the least of which is How do you Get Away With That? With all the PC crap, is not a nutsack trailer hitch beyond the bounds of good taste? Now mind you the owner of this truck is my new hero. Personally, I think children ought to see things like this whenever possible. It builds character. It will make them strong.

The truck pulled away moments later. Gone forever. But I like to believe that he's just down the road, at the local elementary school picking up his own child amidst the throngs of screaming young'uns.

If you go to our new bookmark page you can see our new taggable bookmark thingee. The tagging faq has a few entries specifically about it, including HTML for javascript bookmarking from your toolbar.

the most important part of this to US is that after a URL has been bookmarked, you have the option to write a journal about it, or submit it directly to the Slashdot authors for consideration as an article.

Also you can write a journal entry about it. Journal users will note a new function as well, a Submit to Slashdot function is now included in the Journal form. ticking that box will submit your story to the editors for consideration as a story.

The concept is roughly that you can now use the post-to-slashdot javascript to bookmark a URL. Then, once bookmarked you can write a journal entry about it. And when you check the appropriate box, that story is submitted to the editors. It's all quite simple, and it allows you to blog/submit/bookmark in one place.

Also bookmarks are taggable, so please try to tag them as best you can. We have a lot of stuff coming to this, but for now it's all in testing so please give feedback.

Our fax machine started making a strange noise a few weeks ago. A clicking/popping/mechanical sort of noise. The sort of noise that pretty clearly indicates that the unit is ready to be retired. So I unplugged it. The noises stopped. Peace and tranquility returned to my environment. All is well.

This morning jeff arrived and actually needed to send a fax. Since this happens approximately once a quarter, he was understandably upset that the fax machine wouldn't work. It wouldn't even turn on any more.

What happened next was a blur- sort of Orange County Chopper combined with Office Space. The evidence I present to you now:

We all feel much better.

Today i let a couple of mistakes get through to the homepage. I got a ton of hate mail. I'm feeling really good about myself- especially because my email is lagged by about 45 minutes, so I'm getting the bug reports about 30 minutes after the story goes live. I'm usually quite prompt about correcting stuff that needs it... but SMTP latency is killing me today.

I make mistakes. I'm only human. But i really hate when the feedback mechanism breaks down. And it really is depressing getting 100 messages pop into your box telling you how much you suck for a mistake that was totally honest.

Usually i'm pretty good at letting the water roll off my back when people are mean in email. But the last few weeks has seen my inbox take a turn for the viscious. I'm used to hate mail. I'm used to name calling. But lately it just seems like it's getting worse. Or maybe I'm just getting more sensitive to it.

There are a handful of things that people just flat out don't understand about what we do... the main one is the difference between reading "The Bin" and "The Homepage". On a typical day I might read a few hundred story submissions. I might read another hundred pages that are potentially Slashdot material. And during a typical daddy pants shift, I might post a half a dozen.

This occurs day after day. I might delete a submission that 12 hours later is posted by another editor (maybe there is less to choose from at 11pm than there was at 11am... or maybe a better URL came along to a story that was rejected earlier).

So I kind of see the Slashdot Index differently than others. Some days, like when I'm wearing the pants I'm looking at every story very closely. I concern myself with timing, mix, spelling, quality. Other days the stories aren't mine. I see them differently: I see a story i left in the bin with a note saying "Maybe later?" or a story i rejected because it had a crappy URL. I see several stories I've never seen before. I enjoy those the most.

The problem is that over 8 years of submissions, my posts, and other people's posts start blurring together. I've posted over 10,000 stories. I've rejected hundreds of thousands of submissions. Sometimes I'm simply not going to remember a story from 3 days ago posted by someone else. It's not that I didn't read it- it's that I might have read it 30 times in different places.

There are technical solutions that go a long ways... we have a bunch of keyword searching things in the back end that alerts me if a story with similiar words came up in the last week. But that works spottily at best. The real fall back is the fact that most stories are posted 30 minutes early and screened before subscribers. And this works GREAT. Readers let me know about typos or URL problems in advance. Many articles get fixed, updated, and occasionally deleted during this window. Which unfortunately doesn't work if my SMTP server decides to make me wait 45 minutes for my mail. Stupid protocol. I posted a story for 15:14 GMT. At 15:36 I get a ping saying I have mail. I check the window and see dozens of emails telling me, in increasing hostility, about my error. Those emails were sent as early as 15:00. Bah.

We've discussed using IM and such for disseminating time critical information, but the real issue is GETTING the information. By using email, we raise the bar high enough that people don't arbitrarily spam it. If we put a text field right next to the index, we get so much junk it becomes a meaningless stream of worthless data. To much to keep track of. (Yes, we tried). Email works well for this purpose most of the time since it requires at least a tiny bit more effort than filling in a text field and clicking a button. I think it's a psychological thing- a web form is disposable.. and e-mail is more tangible.

And then the conspiracy theories: Submittor X is paying me to post his stories. Submittor Y is being rejected because I hate him. Advertiser Z gets all their stuff submitted because they are paying us Google is paying me to post their stuff. Yesterday a guy yelled at me for rejecting all his Google stories angry that I'm not posting enough about it.

The truth is less interesting- some guys know how to write good submissions so they get picked a lot. Some advertisers create original content that we find appealing. Since we reject 98% or more of all submissions, so the odds that YOUR submission just got rejected are pretty good. And Google is currently a very hot topic. Just like SCO was a few years ago, and KDE/GNOME was a few years before that. And when each of those stories were at their respective zenithseseses, I got hatemail for posting to much and not enough of those too. It's lose lose sometimes.

So anyway, i'm not in the happiest mood lately. The other reason is that yesterday my iMac shit itself. This particular computer is a normally just a dumb terminal containing little more than mail, web browser, and games, so normally this would be no big deal. Unfortunately i've been working for several weeks now to digitize my families home movies from the 80s, and edit them down as a christmas present for my parents.

The actual digitizing and editing has gone relatively smoothly. But this work in the last few weeks has created 80+ gigs of data that I obviously haven't backed up yet.

Now fortunately the hard drive is OK and it appears that only the operating system blew up. OS X won't let me reinstall tho, so I'm going to have to reformat. So now this machine is mounted as a firewire drive and i'm trying to copy everything over. The problem now is that it takes iDVD like 12 hours of master a DVD... and Christmas is this weekend... so I need to get all 3 DVDs finished, mastered, and copies burnt for relatives. I had plenty of time until my video editing machine needed to barf!

Anyway... it's been a long couple of weeks for me. I'm looking forward to a bit of a holiday break. Maybe it will bring a little more civility to my inbox.

The CSS upgrade went pretty much as smoothly as could be expected. A number of minor glitches showed up and we immediately smashed, and a few other glitches remain, but no 'Show Stopper' type bugs. There are some complaints by some of the users of various modes that get very little play (Light Mode, Opera, and believe it or not, Mosaic) but all in all I'd call the whole thing a success.

We knew light mode would irritate people so let me discuss it a bit here: Light Mode serves two seperate purposes: to provide a low bandwidth Slashdot for people with slow network connections, and to provide people who want a simplified design with just that.

The plan is to seperate those two tasks. The latter is simply new CSS themes targetted to a handful of common design desires. Since the site degrades relatively well, simply using "No" stylesheet actually accomplishes much of what light mode did anyway.

The bandwidth issue is trickier since it requires some actual code logic. Simple things like stripping out a lot of the menus and slashboxes that people don't need is a huge start. It's relatively simple to do but time consuming to do it right.

All of this is actually relatively minor simply because the number of people who actually use light mode number in the hundreds, and its hard to justify spending several days of work writing code to please such a small group, especially because when you get down to that level, they actually want a dozen different things. Some want "Feature Complete" and others want "Stripped Down For Handheld XXX" and others want something in the middle. Facts are we can't appeal to EVERY desire, but we sure do try where it makes sense.

The good news is that the code is in CVS, and now that we have stylesheets, a lot of things that were "Impossible" under the old code are probably just a couple lines in a custom stylesheet.

A few people asked about a redesign of Slashdot which I made mention of in the announcement yesterday. If you want to get started, the gist of it is that Yes, we will have some sort of contest. What prizes? What Rules? When? I have no idea. But if those silly little limitations don't scare you, and you want to get cracking now, let me make a few suggestions:

• The new Slashdot design will have to have all the user interface components you see today. Just because you don't like the section index or the banner ads, a winning design will still need to have them. Now you can move stuff around, or even hide some of it in roll-over menus, but the new design must retain all the links you see today.
• Design elements that ought to persist: the slashdot signature shade of green, the curve in the upper left hand corner, the caliseo font. It would have to be one hell of a design to get me to sacrifice these things which I regard as essential to Slashdot's "Look". I want a new design, but whatever is new will need to pay lip service to the original design. Some sort of visual consistency.
• The topic icons will need to be placed on white unless you plan to rebuild all of them. We don't have source material for a lot of them, and rebuilding a hundred topic icons from scratch is not likely.
• We'll want mockups of the index, an article (with comments!) and probably the user preference page.
• If you can do it entirely within CSS, that would be fantastic. Some minor code changes would be done for a fantastic design, but mostly we want skins to work entirely within a standardized css framework.

With CSS wrapping up, Slashteam is ready to take on some new projects. Pudge has been working on a new form validation system that is more extensible. This will make new forms of validation easier to add, and better error messages. Also the search system is due for a rewrite. The API is designed and the front end is mostly complete. Now its just a matter of building new guts so that it actually finds the right stories. And don't get me started on the moderation system rewrite: after a number of biz related needs (subscriber stuff and daypass advertising stuff) we're finally ready to return to the beast that is Moderation.

If you visit Slashcode.com you will notice that it is now running a brand spanking new CSS template designed by OSTGs Wes Moran and implemented by Tim Vroom and the rest of Slashteam. As some of you are aware, Slashcode.com is a testbed for Slashdot's code development. It gets features a few days before Slashdot so we can test the code on a live site. Of course the site is virtually unused, but that's not really the point for us. It's more about making sure the stuff actually works.

Which is where you come in. If you know a thing or two about CSS and web design, I'd appreciate a look at the site. You can email me if you have specific feedback, comments, criticism. I'd especially like it if people logged in and played with that. You'll notice that a lot of form elements look different. Some intentionally. Some because we haven't actually got around to creating CSS stylesheet entries for the dozens of custom things out there. Also, the comment code itself is completely unchanged. The display of forums will remain pretty much icky old HTML until we either (A) Rewrite the engine (which is planned, but a big project or (B) Someone submits a patch that does it for us. So if you want your chance to get your name in lights on Slashdot, this is a project worth considering. There's a mailing list and a CVS server. What are you waiting for?

The Slashdot CSS theme itself is well underway- the core HTML you see on www.slashcode.com is almost exactly what will be on Slashdot itself, we just need to finish a few parts, fix a few bugs, and work finish the Slashdot Stylesheet. We're looking to have that done in the next few weeks, although actually deploying it on Slashdot itself is a pretty huge project. I want to do it in august since it's usually really quiet, and we have a lot of data that needs to be converted in addition to the actualy site templates.

Pudge has been working a lot on that problem. Specifically we've got scripts to fix HTML in all editor & user contributed content spaces. A lot of this is under way already. Old comments are being automatically fixed in the background. HTML in articles from 1998 is being corrected. Scripts are working very hard. And in some cases, tired editors have been re-reading stories from 1998 to correct HTML errors that boggle the mind. None of this is perfect, so don't be to surprised if you find something wonky. Feel free to mail me URLs if you see it. We've got almost 60,000 articles, 900,000 users, and like 13 million comments. There will be mistakes.

Lastly, once Slashdot has successfully been ported to CSS, we'll have a lot more design flexibility. I expect that soon after we'll actually be ready to give the tired old design a facelift. If anyone has ideas, you can start playing with designs today by simply modifying www.slashcode.com's CSS stylesheet. my guess is we'll have a contest similiar to the T-Shirt contest we ran awhile back- users can contribute designs and I'll select from the best a new look for Slashdot. I'm really looking forward to that. I'll miss having Slashdot be "My" design, but the site still looks like 1997 and it's time for new life to go with fancy new web technology.

Also, my rogue hit 60 in WoW a few days ago. I also made my Volcanic armor set and have a few nifty other items w/ high fire resist. Now to get attuned and visit that toasty place known as Molten Core! And somehow save another 400gp for my epic mount. There's just no end to this game.

One very common abuse of the posting system is for a user to post something logged in, and then reply to himself anonymously pretending to agree with his point. "Yes yes, I agree with what Joe is saying." Or in the case of trolls, they might go so far as to argue with themself. A single person can make it look as if they are a dozen with just a couple of accounts.

I've seen some pretty terrible abuses of this problem, but usually it's relatively minor. I've been toying with an idea to solve this problem to at least some extent- essentially, if the same IP replies to itself using a different nickname or anonymously, we auto-moderate the reply down. We can exclude proxy servers from this. We could expand this to only allow a single nickname to post within a single forum, but I don't know how many false hits that would catch in the net.

The idea of allowing anonymous posting is that sometimes you need to say something that for very real, very legitimate reasons, you don't want your name attached to it. The logic behind this is that if you're trying to alternate between signing your name and not, you're more likely to be abusing the system than to be using it legitimately.

Thoughts? A few of you can post. Others can email.

On May 18 I'm speaking in Tokyo at GLOCOM. Space is very limited, but if you'd like to go, contact Masayuki Hatta. We're apparently also going to have a party on May 19, but I'll yell when I know more.

My WoW Dwarven Paladin on Algazor hit level 26, and Drew/Thorzin from my guild took me on the whirlwind tour to get my mega hammer of bringin-the-hurt-in. I had the first 2 components, but the fourth component required us to haul ass into horde territory. The game continues to amaze me. After 2 weeks of fairly excessive gameplay, I still have only explored a half dozen maps- maybe 5-10% of the world? You seriously could play this game for MONTHS. Which I guess makes sense given the number of level 60 characters with 30-40 game *days* into their chars. Highly addictive. Kathleen's mage is a few levels behind me. Gnomes are adorable. I like to play with her just to here her cheer when we do something neat.

Slashdot's CSS port continues to move along. Tim has the basic stuff done for the generic slashcode theme. We're waiting for Wes to finish mocking up some of the lesser used pages (like journals and user preferences). After we roll those into the slashcode theme, the actual task of moving Slashdot to CSS will likely take only a few more days since it will just be mangling around the CSS files, and the actual slashcode themes will become relatively set in stone. Look and feel can be easily twiddled by editing the css templates, and slashcode itself won't need to be changed. Man HTML has come a long ways in the decade since I started.

And I'd just like to wish a happy birthday to my beautiful wife.

This weekend was Penguicon where I played WoW. Also, I played WoW. And I had a surprisingly interesting panel on the age of the open source hobbyist with Nat Torkington and ESR. There was some lively discussion. I was entertained participating. I hope others had fun too. Also, I played WoW.

With just one night home I packed up and went to Cleveland (which is nothing like Howard the Duck made it out to be) to speak at Case Western. The talk went really well. The audience seemed very responsive. Clearly a large contingent of hardcore Slashdot readers. They even hooked me up with fantastic prizes to give away. I tried to use my cellphone as a clicker for the presentation, which usually works, but the stars were apparently misaligned... oh, and I tend to pace when I talk... right out the range of bluetooth devices ;)

This afternoon I'm going to visit the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame which everyone tells me is a glorious waste of time... but they are doing a huge Tommy exhibit and my obsession with Pete Townshend knows no limits. So therefore it beckons to me like... well... WoW.

After the drive back to michigan I think I get to stay "Home" for several weeks. That will be great. Time to level and pet the kittens.