IceNews has had a facelift and is now ready to provide a better Nordic news service than ever before!
Not only is the site more attractive now (we think so anyway), but it also has some great new features in the works which we hope you’ll notice over the coming days and weeks.
Look out for our dedicated editorial and comment section which will contain opinions and views from a wide range of people on a wide range of subjects. As well as IceNews editors, we will also feature articles written by politicians, businesspeople, names from the news and IceNews READERS! If you have something you want to say and you can encapsulate it into an interesting and informative article, please feel free to send it over to us at news(AT)icenews.is.
On the subject of commenting, please keep our new commenting guidelines in mind when writing user comments about articles. A link to the new guidelines will appear at the top of the homepage in the next few days.
If something about the new IceNews disappoints you (like the fact that four days of reader comments appear to have disappeared), please know that we are working hard to bring all the best bits of old IceNews over to the new site and hopefully you won’t stay disappointed for long.
As always, we would like to say thank you for reading IceNews. Every time somebody chooses to click on our site, we know it is a privilege and we are truly grateful for your support.
Make sure you check your junk folder – wordpress tends to have that problem sometimes
>Well, I did try to register but WordPress would not send me the confirm email.
I just tried again and even an hour later I did not get the email.
Any one else got that problem ?
Dear anonymous designer:
>Hi guys, one of the designers here,
>appreciate all the comments and suggestions here. We’re still working on the new
>layout and will continue to keep an eye out for your comments.
It is good to have seen the odd small improvement done since the change over on 22 January but..
1. The new templates are a mess for reading the articles. It must show all of the comments for the article like before on the same page.
This was IceNews strength.
And the old permalinks that are posted all around here in old threads and also are in Google must * NOT * break but work like before taking clicker directly to the specific comment.
2. As Bjarni does ask:
>Any news on reloading the missing comments, both the long discussions and the missing period, 18-22 January?
I am beginning wonder if Alex and other editors do care about the community of posters that has formed here.
Certainly I can see nothing other than contempt for the community of posters here because this is not fixed.
Please understand that you own the site, but the community comes here and add a lot of value for you, and you are making that difficult for us posters by * not * fixing these things.
( It was fair to give some time to fix these, but now you have had enough time. )
Fix this problems !!
Brumley wrote :
>Of course, I’ve bagged Fisy’s name :) .
Well, I did try to register but WordPress would not send me the confirm email.
I can help with the long discussions one, but you’re not going to like it :) . For example:
1. Open More Members of Parliament against the Icesave deal in the Popular tab.
2. Look under Trackbacks/Pingbacks. Aside from any trackbacks, it should be blank between that & Leave a Reply.
3. Click on the date under the poster’s name in one of the comments.
The trackbacks then seem to get forced onto an earlier page (the first?) and you can now use the Older Comments button to travel back in time. It’s a one-way journey though – you’ll need to use your browsers back button to move forwards through the comments.
If you think that’s a mess, try using Google to search for old comments :D .
Any news on reloading the missing comments, both the long discussions and the missing period, 18-22 January?
Another bleat from me, but would it be possible to put a line space before the first line of text in a comment?
That means that, after the message has been moderated and Your comment is awaiting moderation disappears, the first line will start under the picture rather than indented and to the right of it. Just makes for easier reading.
Not a major problem, but long URLs aren’t word-wrapping and so extend off the page. Like this:
http://www.cidob.org/en/news/europe/iceland_and_the_eu_the_road_ahead_european_breakfast_with_jon_baldvin_hannibalsson_ex_minister_of_foreign_affairs_and_international_trade_of_iceland
Also, I’d like to echo Bjarni’s point about being able to search comments. And restate my one about activating the blockquote tag, if that’s at all possible (more for legibility of previous comments – I’m switching to the italic tag for quotes as it’s harder to misspell “i” :) ).
Thanks again for the changes to date.
It’s probably been there for a while & I just didn’t notice, but we can now pretect our names! No more Jimmmyjimjim (fomerly Jimbo, formerly Jim).
Of course, I’ve bagged Fisy’s name :) .
j/k
“If you want to bold, as above, it’s:
-b+Type away here-/b+
Where – is the less than sign and + is the more than sign. Let’s see if the other easy ones work:
u for underline
i for italics”
Well, they do call it code :)
Here it goes.
bold text
italics
underlined
I’m glad the block quote tag is gone, never figured out properly how it worked.
Yep, I never did like having to type out “blockquote” – I was too likely to make a mistake when rushing. Certainly makes reading the old stuff hard though :) .
If you want to bold, as above, it’s:
-b+Type away here-/b+
Where – is the less than sign and + is the more than sign. Let’s see if the other easy ones work:
u for underline
i for italics
I’m glad the block quote tag is gone, never figured out properly how it worked.
Overall the facelift is a very neat upgrade and a step forward.
The “massive ground lost” has been regained with the re-upgrading of the comments menu, now with title of article included and the 10 latest comments displayed.
There seems to be a problem with some of the old comments.
I was looking at the Popular tab. In it is an article:
“Icelandic economy: making sense of the unintelligible”
In that, it says that there are 161 responses, which is presumably why it ranks as one of the 5 most poular.
However, I can only see 8 comments. It’s definitely a case of missing/hidden comments, rather than a mis-reporting of the number of responses, because you can see Alex answering a question I asked, but not the question itself.
I checked the other 4 most popular and it’s the same with all of them (although I couldn’t see an obvious pattern as to what was missing).
A lot of the old comments don’t make as much sense now that the blockquote tag doesn’t work :) .
Hi guys, one of the designers here,
appreciate all the comments and suggestions here. We’re still working on the new layout and will continue to keep an eye out for your comments.
Thanks unnamed designers!
Regarding the improved Comments tab, I’ve some more feedback:
1. Inclusion of the first part of the comment. I still think this is unnecessary. As I see it, the main reason for inclusion is so people can see if they’ve already read that comment (there’s not enough displayed to act as a preview to draw people in). However, regular readers will likely remember what the Comments tab looked like last time they checked, so they’ll know whether the comments are new. It won’t be an issue for infrequent visitors, as the entries in the Comments tab will have changed by then.
Reasons for removing it are:
(a) to increase clarity – it adds nothing of value but does slow down visual recognition of who posted,
(b) to free up lines to include more comments :) . If the comments were all limited to 2 lines (title & name), then the resulting saving of 9 lines would allow another 3 recent comments to be shown in the same space.
2. Bold titles. These seem to take a second or so to come into focus, almost as if the font is being changed from a very blocky to a smoothed one. Not a huge issue though.
Interestingly, this doesn’t happen when the page is opened/refreshed, only when the tab is changed. So this really is a very minor issue now that Comments have been moved to the front (thanks again!).
To Alex:
I definitely agree with ALL the “suggestions” from Bromley86, Terry, and Mike. I understand you want to have a professional news site, and the new look and design is definitely a good step in the right direction.
But, just as important for your audience, you have become THE meeting place in the blogsphere, where people interested in Iceland for various reasons (good or bad) can exchange ideas and have debates about real issues. Many web sites try for many years, to accomplish this kind of traffic, but never succeed.
There were several ingredients that are typically necessary for this kind of successful blog discussion to happen:
1. The first one being active news service, that provides timely content to talk about.
2. Open to everyone, so long as they don’t break your relatively relaxed guidelines, although enforced when needed (it actually hurts the discussion if there are too many “loonies”)
3. Very quick way to locate right on the home page, what threads were active and who had posted on them. I agree wholeheartedly with Bromley while listing only 10 was limited, 5 is much worse. It does not list the article name, but you can keep the mouse hovering above it, but thats very cumbersome.
4. Group of about active 10 posters (not alway the same, remember William Wallace, bc123a, and Kjartan?), that were acting as kind of anchors, and leading the discussion towards a real debate that others could join.
5. Ability to go back to older stories by calendar month. It is not there anymore.
6. Ability to search for older articles. I know we flamed you a little bit on its deficiencies, but it was at least possible to find selected comments with it, if you knew how to work the system. The current search, doesn’t even look at all in the comments.
Unfortunately, the current setup has lost most of the ingredients, which makes active threaded discussion almost possible. I am looking forward to see your changes/fixes soon to the site, so we can back to our debating.
Any news on reloading the missing comments? The week of 18-22 was a very heavy discussion period with lot of interesting posts that would be sad to loose.
BTW, I have some of them saved on my computer, including two of the most active, Sweden Wait and FT Editor in particular. When I realized what was happening, I made sure I didn’t close any windows, before saving them.
Cheers Alex.
Just been taking another look around and I’ve got a positive comment this time :) .
The “Latest” tab is great. Easy, clear layout. 10 items. More useful even than the Home page!
It would be great if that same layout could be used for the “Popular” tab.
The “Comments” layout just needs a few changes to work. As it does at the moment, keep all entries to 2 lines. First line is just the posters name, second the article title (or as much of it as will fit). The order can be swapped if you think title then poster name makes more sense. Lose the photos in this tab – unlike the “Latest” and “Popular” tabs, photos don’t add much and do clutter the display, especially by reducing the line length.
It would be better if the “Comments” tab was moved to the front so that it rather than “Popular” displayed immediately when the Home page opens. Also, as I said earlier, the 10 comments shown before was insufficient if just one poster got excited or if there were a number of active topics going at the same time, so 5 really isn’t enough. The good news is that there’s presumably no design block to at least 10 comments, as there are already 10 articles in the “Latest” tab.
However, I am aware that if the “Comments” tab is moved to the front and if it is expanded back to 10 (or even to 20+), then the adverts get pushed right down. Ways around this is include:
1. Having another “Comments” tab which does display 20+ items, or
2. Having a button in the tab (say in the bottom right corner) that expands the box from 5-10 to 20+, or
3. Making “Latest” the first tab with 5-10 items (keeps the ads up near the top of the page), then “Popular” with 10-20 items, then “Comments” with 20+ items.
Finally, a larger Reply box would be appreciated (i.e. say 20 lines rather than 10) and shouldn’t mess things up as it’s at the bottom of the page. Obviously some way to preview a comment would be excellent, but that might be getting gready :) .
(I got borded of qualifying everything with “IMO” and “for me”, so please take it as read that this is just my personal preference).
Hi Terry (and everybody else!),
As the editor, my role here mostly relates to the site’s content and not its layout. All the points raised here have been passed to our designers and they are keeping an eye on comments to this particular article.
We would ask for patience as we attempt to optimise the new site so that it is more than just pretty to look at.
Some commenters have said that the old site was preferable because it was simple; but we feel that it was just too simple and had the appearance of a personal blog instead of a proper news website. To this end, we have tried to bring the new site’s appearance more in line with other news sites.
We want the new IceNews to be better than the old one in every way and we certainly don’t want to lose readers because of the change. As mentioned in the article above, we will be implementing changes in the coming days and weeks.
I hope this helps. Thanks, as always, for reading IceNews.
Alex, editor
Bromley86 said:
>”There’s also the issue of wasted text and non-standard entries.”
That’s just the standard of my posts Bromley – nothing to do with site layout : )
Alex, I agree with the points raised. You are not being very interactive with the readership relating to the changes – is this because you are presently too busy trying to recover the lost comments?
I agree with Bromley86. The new layout is more professional, flashier, but it lacks clarity and functionality – particularly as regards picking up on people’s comments (and it is these comments which lie at the heart of Icenews – the level of activity, debate, the openness, the liberality and the diversity of opinion is beyond any other Icelandic news site). I have just made a post on the debt issue but I doubt I will be returning much if I can’t see what others are saying.
Initial feelings. Bearing in mind that I’m here mainly for the discussion of articles rather than just reading recent news items.
In terms of discussion of the articles, this is a massive step backwards. I tended to use the Comments display to see what people had posted. As it was, at 10 it was way too small to provide the “correct” level of functionality, but it did suffice. An increase to 20 (or even more) would have been ideal.
So the current change where I first have to click on “Comments” to open the recent comments and the display of only 5 is a massive step back. For me.
There’s also the issue of wasted text and non-standard entries. A recent comment byTerry provides a perfect example:
Terry: Axel said: >”thats the time of year when we …
That is hopeless, and a huge step back from the previous display. Note how there’s nothing identifying the article that he’s posted in, there’s no standard layout that lets you process the information quickly (once you’re familiar with how it’s displayed) and how the text is actually Terry quoting someone else.
I liked the standardised display of the old IceNews, in that I could easily evaluate & skip past articles that weren’t of interest. The current format is more confused, but that’s perhaps just me, or it might be something that I could get used to. Still, I’ve yet to get used to the “new” eBay layout, so perhaps not :) .
The new format looks nice and glossy. I’ll post some feedback in a few days time after getting used to it.
Looks good :)
Good job!
Very nice site.. I actually looked up to make sure i’d typed in the right address when the page came up!
Fisy said
>But.. please please make it so that we can * register * as the wordpress users here. So we can view poster history, etc, etc. from search links.
Yes fully agree.
Dear Alex :
Good that you are listening to us that do post here lot and, that the new look is here.
I will hold off in constructive criticisms until early next week — to give time to fix. :)
But.. please please make it so that we can * register * as the wordpress users here. So we can view poster history, etc, etc. from search links.