Something seems different; did you get new glasses?

November 21, 2005 2:08 PM

New blue layout? Is it perement?
posted by wheelieman to Bugs at 2:08 PM (118 comments total)

We just did this.
posted by hototogisu at 2:09 PM on November 21, 2005

It's not just for the blue. Read the thread from a couple of days ago.
posted by The Monkey at 2:10 PM on November 21, 2005

I like how I said it with less snark.
posted by The Monkey at 2:10 PM on November 21, 2005

You didn't change the font for Metafilter on the new header graphic. Awesome!
posted by banished at 2:11 PM on November 21, 2005

I just reloaded it. It's transforming!
posted by driveler at 2:11 PM on November 21, 2005

Jacta alea est!
posted by geoff. at 2:11 PM on November 21, 2005

I likes it. But fwiw: my timezone is a few hours off, although it says EST...
posted by Robot Johnny at 2:12 PM on November 21, 2005

Rock!
posted by cortex at 2:13 PM on November 21, 2005

As a heads-up, Archives is returning a CF error at present.
posted by killdevil at 2:13 PM on November 21, 2005

I like how you said it after I did, with less snark, so it's like there was a cushion of politeness after the snark, and so the poster would be all like "wow, that was shit, but oh, I feel warm inside, man, I'm glad he said that after that other guy said the thing with the link in it. Man. Time for some schnapps."

Yeah.
posted by hototogisu at 2:14 PM on November 21, 2005

Oh, and my timezone problem is only in the header (where it appears to be using the PST time, but claiming it's EST). Timezones in the posts themselves are fine.
posted by Robot Johnny at 2:14 PM on November 21, 2005

When I saw it was live, I panicked because I had to come to MetaTalk immediately to see what people were saying - and I couldn't find the MetaTalk link!

But then I did, so everything's hunky-dory.
posted by soyjoy at 2:15 PM on November 21, 2005

I don't like how all the links are UNDER the banner now. The page doesn't "start" properly until halfway down my screen. Put them back at the top rather than horizontally down the left side, kthxbye!
posted by Eideteker at 2:16 PM on November 21, 2005

Some sort of visual signifier would be nice inside the search box on the header. A lot of sites use "<search>" for this, which disappears when you focus the search text input box.
posted by killdevil at 2:16 PM on November 21, 2005

/archives.html should be /archive.html

word up killdevil
posted by cortex at 2:17 PM on November 21, 2005

Eideteker, I had that too. Do a reload, you may be caching the old css or something.
posted by cortex at 2:18 PM on November 21, 2005

The front page looks really crappy to me (using Firefox); everything's piled up vertically, thus:


* MetaFilter
* AskMeFi
* Projects
* MetaTalk

November 21, 2005 2:03 PM EST

* Home
* About
* Archives
* Etc.


* Preferences
* Post a Link
* My Posts
* My Comments

26434 members | You are logged in as: languagehat / logout
9 links and 535 comments posted since your last visit

November 21
posted by languagehat at 2:19 PM on November 21, 2005

languagehat: try shift-reload
posted by vacapinta at 2:21 PM on November 21, 2005

That was weird. A little while ago I did a refresh and managed to catch it between updates or something, so the CSS was all munged. Refreshed again moments later and everything changed to the new version.

On preview: Yeah, that's what I saw, Eideteker and languagehat. Force a refresh with a ctrl-F5 or ctrl-refresh button. It goes away.

POSSIBLE BUG REPORT: All internal links (such as in the linkbar above) are popping in new windows from the blue. It didn't do that before.

Also, in the old version things like some links from profile pages popped in a new window, while others didn't. I've always figured that for best-usage the "open links in new window" option should be set to only open external links in new windows, not the internal ones at all.

But maybe other people want all links to open in new windows, I have no idea how others at interfacing with MeFi.

I think I'm just going to have to stop being lazy and turn off the "open links in new window" option entirely.
posted by loquacious at 2:21 PM on November 21, 2005

cache is the devil
posted by cortex at 2:22 PM on November 21, 2005

Saw the thread the other day; like the change even more in the flesh. Bung-o!
posted by donpedro at 2:22 PM on November 21, 2005

I was getting a white page with yellow text on firefox, then I closed it and opened a new one. Did it go away, languagehat?
posted by hototogisu at 2:22 PM on November 21, 2005

perement?
posted by mr_crash_davis at 2:24 PM on November 21, 2005

The logo and green bar don't properly overlap in IE6 but seem fine in Firefox. I guess it's an IE image rendering bug.
posted by dodgygeezer at 2:25 PM on November 21, 2005

Anyone else getting a horizontal scrollbar in firefox?
posted by squeak at 2:25 PM on November 21, 2005

Refresh your CSS. Actually, let me change the name of it slightly to force it on everyone with the old one.

The archives link and the timezone thing are fixed.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 2:26 PM on November 21, 2005

mmm, assy.
posted by keswick at 2:27 PM on November 21, 2005

yep, IE/win doesn't understand png alpha transparency, so I had to kludge it.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 2:27 PM on November 21, 2005

Looks and works all cool in Safari.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:27 PM on November 21, 2005

Thanks Crash, Typo corrections always welcome. I like the design better in Oprea, as allready mentioned, the new design sucks in Mozilla.
posted by wheelieman at 2:28 PM on November 21, 2005

the new design sucks in Mozilla.

You have the old CSS file. reload.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 2:29 PM on November 21, 2005

loquacious, I also find it irritating that internal links are opening in new windows. I suppose I'll have to turn off my "open links in new window" option, as well.
posted by trip and a half at 2:32 PM on November 21, 2005

Any plan to move this over to the white (plain text) background preference? I love that you all always talk about the "blue" and I'm lookin' at white. Plus it's got less intense afterimage.
posted by Divine_Wino at 2:33 PM on November 21, 2005

Matt, can you drop a thin white line under the header to distinguish the "header" blue from the "Page background" blue? The two blues look odd side by side to me. I like how the old header had that small distinction. (Like MetaTalk and AskMetafilter still do.)
posted by evoo at 2:38 PM on November 21, 2005

Well, Now that white line is gone in Metatalk!
posted by evoo at 2:46 PM on November 21, 2005

these blue links are swank. no really okay not really
posted by keswick at 2:48 PM on November 21, 2005

cache rules everything around me.

It's working now, thanks.
posted by Eideteker at 2:51 PM on November 21, 2005

Lose the white line. Much cleaner without. The seperation is obvious without the line.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:51 PM on November 21, 2005

Yeah, the white line, not so much.

I'll add the links to the plain text theme later today, so you guys can get to the same places as the graphical view.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 2:55 PM on November 21, 2005

Thanks.
posted by Divine_Wino at 2:55 PM on November 21, 2005

Will these swank new headers eventually be on the "my posts" and "my comments" pages? They seem a little deserted without navigation.
posted by Robot Johnny at 2:57 PM on November 21, 2005

Excellent facelift, Matt.
Next time you're in Indy, the pint's on me.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:58 PM on November 21, 2005

I love it.
posted by planetkyoto at 2:59 PM on November 21, 2005

It must be an optical illusion, but the oblong white shape enclosing the logo looks asymmetrical or misshapen somehow.
posted by _sirmissalot_ at 3:00 PM on November 21, 2005

Internet petition to make metafilter background colours random on each page load.
posted by holloway at 3:02 PM on November 21, 2005

It must be an optical illusion

Yeah, the bottom of the nav area hits that white elipse at a very odd angle, and the area above the middle green bar is smaller than the area below the middle green bar, so it creates the illusion that the shape isn't symmetrical.
posted by Robot Johnny at 3:02 PM on November 21, 2005

Text entered into the search box is light grey on lighter grey. Not so good.
posted by cillit bang at 3:07 PM on November 21, 2005

"Behind the website"?

Oh dear, no.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 3:13 PM on November 21, 2005

yeah, the shape is kind of oblong. It was oblong before, but at a different angle. I'll see if it grows on me and change it in a day or two if it's still looking odd.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 3:14 PM on November 21, 2005

By the way, dosn't matt have a test server he can like, test this on? The whole front page had a white background for a few minutes, and now the MeTa logo dosn't look right.
posted by Paris Hilton at 3:15 PM on November 21, 2005

Actualy the logo is just wrong in IE.
posted by Paris Hilton at 3:16 PM on November 21, 2005

Is it just me, or did the (foo new) links on the comments line of posts just lose a distinctive link color in the last little bit?

Am I just imagining it was ever different?
posted by cortex at 3:18 PM on November 21, 2005

Re: the weird optical illusion that the ellipse is causing, because the green bar makes it seem that the shape is asymmetrical, it almost looks like it's curving down and flattening out.

And at the bottom, because it extends below the nav area, the nav bar looks like it curves downwards at the left...



Without stepping on your toes, Matt, I did a quick little mockup that reduces these little anomalies. This also allows the Metafilter logo to be surrounded by equal amounts of whitespace on all sides.



I know you've been working hard on this, Matt, so take this with a grain of salt, because I really do love the new look!
posted by Robot Johnny at 3:19 PM on November 21, 2005

Apparently it's not supposed to look like this, then. (Maxthon (IE, basically), WinXP SP2):



Perhaps I need to empty my cache.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 3:23 PM on November 21, 2005

(Nope, that didn't do it...)
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 3:24 PM on November 21, 2005

"behind the website"!?

MATT! No. Please no. I beg and plead.

"Thar be teh bitching and shit" would be less painful.
posted by loquacious at 3:29 PM on November 21, 2005

hmm. I'm doing some IE javascript trick to make the png alpha transparency kind of work. It worked for me in XP2 on my IE 6. Perhaps the javascript can't pick up on maxathon and every other IE variant.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 3:31 PM on November 21, 2005

This CSS + .htc way is pretty good for adding alpha to IE.
posted by holloway at 3:36 PM on November 21, 2005

I'm getting the same as the chicken posted. IE.
posted by Mid at 3:41 PM on November 21, 2005

I like robot johnny's proposed fix. Looks much more finished somehow.

Also - another vote against Behind the Website. please please please no
posted by CunningLinguist at 3:44 PM on November 21, 2005

Ditto Stav and Mid. XP Pro, IE6. Why must you be so rectangular, Metatalk logo?
posted by cortex at 3:49 PM on November 21, 2005

Anyone else getting a horizontal scrollbar in firefox?

I am too. Cleared my cache and everything, just in case, but still.
posted by Gator at 3:58 PM on November 21, 2005

Oh, hey! I am also getting a horizontal scroll bar. I was wondering why the browsing area looked smaller, but I guess I wasn't wondering very hard.
posted by loquacious at 3:59 PM on November 21, 2005

Six words. It couldn't have been that hard to spell them all correctly.
Jesus, what a post.
posted by Joeforking at 4:14 PM on November 21, 2005

I'm using the CSS + .htc method. It works fine for me in ask mefi and mefi, though metatalk has a weird gray background on the logo, even though everything else is the same.

The old slogan "we're all in this together" was kind of goofy. I picked something innocuous that seemed more apt.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 4:16 PM on November 21, 2005

Man, I miss access keys already :(
posted by boo_radley at 4:18 PM on November 21, 2005

There's no need to drop access keys entirely, just use the keys that are available. These are 0-9 / ? . , [ ]
posted by holloway at 4:22 PM on November 21, 2005

fandango_matt... SLICK!

I've consistently liked your ideas and mockups.
posted by evoo at 4:24 PM on November 21, 2005

ps. Good choice on the alpha pngs rather than aliasing gifs to grey... makes the printable version look good :)
posted by holloway at 4:25 PM on November 21, 2005

I ah... really liked the old one.
posted by Stan Chin at 4:28 PM on November 21, 2005

It looks really sharp and professional now.
posted by smackfu at 4:38 PM on November 21, 2005

The change just isn't drastic enough for my tastes.
posted by delmoi at 4:44 PM on November 21, 2005

Internet petition to make metafilter background colours random on each page load.

signed
posted by moift at 4:51 PM on November 21, 2005

bug-type thing: is there just a crazy crapload of white space in the in-line style header stuff on the blue?
posted by cortex at 4:51 PM on November 21, 2005

The horizontal scrollbar is only on Firefox/Win, on my mac it looks fine.

Playing around with the live Edit CSS feature of the Web Developer Toolbar, as far as I can tell, something in the header is telling the page to be 3px wider than it should be, but I went through and tried tweaking every class with padding, width, or margins and couldn't figure it out.

The old culprit was one padding declaration. If anyone figures out the fix for the new layout, email me and I'll apply it asap.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 4:52 PM on November 21, 2005

cortex, what do you mean?
posted by mathowie (staff) at 4:53 PM on November 21, 2005

The horizontal scrollbar is also on Firefox/Linux (Ubuntu 5.10).

Maybe cortext means the whitespace between the style tags and css... that's just coldfusion, it makes it difficult to control whitespace.
posted by holloway at 4:56 PM on November 21, 2005

My apologies, cortex
posted by holloway at 4:56 PM on November 21, 2005

I mean when I view source on the front page, there's a good 15-20 lines of white space before the initial DOCTYPE tag, and the inline style stuff that follows that has a pile of whitespace throughout that makes it huge.

Firefox, XP. It's totally non-critical; I'm just wondering about some pretty-printing for the sake of the occasional page-source aesthete.
posted by cortex at 4:57 PM on November 21, 2005

Yeah, that's just CF logic you're missing. I could compress it, but it requires a little server processing to supress whitespace before sending to browsers so I turned it off.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 4:59 PM on November 21, 2005

Maybe cortex[sonofabitching typo removed, you heartless bastard!] means the whitespace between the style tags and css... that's just coldfusion, it makes it difficult to control whitespace.

If that's the case, I'll just hush up entirely.
posted by cortex at 5:00 PM on November 21, 2005

IMO the scroll bar isn't really a critical issue. Like I noted above I didn't even really notice it was there except for the 10-odd pixels of lost vertical viewing space.
posted by loquacious at 5:04 PM on November 21, 2005

Weird, a scrollbar in metatalk too on windows/FF. If anyone comes up with a fix, I'll paypal you $20.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 5:12 PM on November 21, 2005

FWIW, I get no horizontal scrollbar in FF 1.5RC3 on WinXP.
posted by killdevil at 5:15 PM on November 21, 2005

Did it go away, languagehat?

Yup. Now I just have to get used to the new design.
posted by languagehat at 5:17 PM on November 21, 2005

Weird, a scrollbar in metatalk too on windows/FF. If anyone comes up with a fix, I'll paypal you $20.

The problem is in your UL NAVGLOBAL. Change it from inline to block and see what I mean.

No money. Just fix the "my comments" to be in the correct order again and we'll call it even. :)
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 5:27 PM on November 21, 2005

Specifically, try this:

newdefault.css:

#navglobal {
display:block;
float:right;
margin: 0px;
padding: 0px;
font-size: 11px;
}

#navseldom, #navoften {
display:block;
float:left;
margin: 0px;
padding: 0px;
font-size: 11px;
}
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 5:31 PM on November 21, 2005

Oh, and by the way, you really shouldn't hard-code your font heights in pixels. EM's is the way to go. Just sayin'.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 5:32 PM on November 21, 2005

Looks great! I like the slikness aprt from the logo having the rectangle around it in MeTalk, AskMe. and often MeFi when it loads.
posted by stirfry at 5:35 PM on November 21, 2005

If you'd like to give me a job as "code fixer-upper and maker-nicer-looking-er", I'm ready. My seat of the pants estimate is that you could probably get rid of half the page weight by just getting rid of the extra carriage returns.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 5:39 PM on November 21, 2005

Hell, even moving the CSS off into a separate file with long http expiry would help tremendously.

But then what I really want for christmas is pilfer.metafilter.com to work on, so I can put a great engine and good html behind this :)
posted by holloway at 5:46 PM on November 21, 2005

Bug: The Ask front page now has two search boxes. The top searches MetaTalk on Yahoo; the bottom one AskMe on Google.
posted by cillit bang at 6:06 PM on November 21, 2005

Here's something that could be fixed. In the My Comments section (great layout, btw!), the description of each post leaves out the text of the initial link. This often results in a broken sentence. For instance, this post of Matt's should properly say:

"Celebrity Maps is a google maps/stargazing mashup that makes stalking your favorite star so much easier."

Because the "Celebrity Maps" portion is a link, it comes up in My Comments as:

"is a google maps/stargazing mashup that makes stalking your favorite star so much easier."
posted by painquale at 6:28 PM on November 21, 2005

C_D changing them to display:block and the lists become vertical, totally blowing out the design.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 6:32 PM on November 21, 2005

The inline search box in the green defaults to searching MetaTalk.
posted by matildaben at 6:37 PM on November 21, 2005

Screen grab, Mr. Owie:


posted by Civil_Disobedient at 6:43 PM on November 21, 2005

And the same goes for IE 6.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 6:44 PM on November 21, 2005

Just for reference, here's a screen cap of the before shot, mit horizontal scroll bar:

posted by Civil_Disobedient at 6:51 PM on November 21, 2005

The date stamps don't work in MeTa and AskMe comments: they're still at PST. Fine on the white.
posted by bonaldi at 7:21 PM on November 21, 2005

May I suggest "Behind the Curtain" instead?
posted by yhbc at 7:32 PM on November 21, 2005

lots of little bugs mentioned have been fixed, and thanks C_D for the CSS fix.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 7:39 PM on November 21, 2005

fandango_matt, I used your nicer curves for the new logos and I moved from a condensed trade gothic to a standard bold oblique. I think the dark stripe makes it a tad too NASCAR, and the horizontal stripes are hard to read html text links over, so I stuck with the diagonals. Thanks for the help on those curves, the old logo files look totally messed up compared to the smooth oval they've been replaced with.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 8:30 PM on November 21, 2005

Strange behaviour: The links to Metafilter, MetaTalk, etc. now follow the option you've set in your preferences re: links in a new window vs. the same window. It used to be that these links always opened in the same window. I don't know if this was intentional or not, but it threw me for a loop.
posted by Johnny Assay at 8:52 PM on November 21, 2005

Oops, fixed the targets on global nav upper right.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:32 PM on November 21, 2005

It would be nice if we could specify, maybe in preferences, whether the search box in the upper right goes to yahoo or google.
posted by speicus at 9:52 PM on November 21, 2005

speicus, there's always the search page with both.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:04 PM on November 21, 2005

I know, I know, I'm just lazy. In general I really like the new look.
posted by speicus at 10:39 PM on November 21, 2005

mathowie, I know it's not a democracy, but I prefer Fandango_Matt's "nascar" stripe, it makes for a nice visual break between the logos & the nav.
posted by jonson at 10:58 PM on November 21, 2005

I've already gotten used to it, but when I first saw it, I have to admit that I thought that I was having an acid flashback.
posted by interrobang at 11:01 PM on November 21, 2005

horizontal scrollbar on firefox 1.07/ubuntu linux 5.10 only in metatalk thread pages, not on metatalk front page or elsewhere on site.
posted by quonsar at 11:05 PM on November 21, 2005

Eh, I like Matt's one more. The colour scheme here looks like a 70s bit of plasticware, and Fandango's one doesn't look so much like a beveled edge but a logo.floating above the rest.
posted by holloway at 12:03 AM on November 22, 2005

I know I'm too late for all of this, but it looks fab to me. Having all of the MeFi group sites in the same order in the same place on every page is about 12x better than it was.

One minor gripe is that the date & time is now pretty indistinct, for a second I thought you'd done away with it all together.

Good stuff Matt. I vote for your project.
posted by NinjaPirate at 1:46 AM on November 22, 2005

Nice changes, Matt.

And the "my recent comments' has navigation now, YAY! The text seems REALLY BIG on that page though.
posted by If I Had An Anus at 6:16 AM on November 22, 2005

(Firefox on windows)
posted by If I Had An Anus at 6:16 AM on November 22, 2005

Love it, Matt. Pint's on me if you're ever in Toronto. :)
posted by Hildegarde at 6:40 AM on November 22, 2005

Can each section in the Recent Comments page have its own appropriate background color?
posted by cillit bang at 6:49 AM on November 22, 2005

I'm not sure if this is the same horizontal scrollbar from the comments above, but I am getting a horizontal scrollbar when I click on the MetaTalk link in the upper-right corner of the global nav. When I click on the link, the browser highlights it with a dotted box, making the page 1px too wide for a second, until the browser follows the link to MetaTalk. The same thing happens when I just tab through the links to the MetaTalk link. I'm runnning FireFox 1.5 RC3 on Windows.
posted by stopgap at 7:48 AM on November 22, 2005

A bit late to the party, but is there any word on when this will migrate to the "white" MeFi layout (mine of choice)?
posted by mkultra at 11:05 AM on December 7, 2005