January 25, 2001
10:22 AM   Subscribe

When did Mo revive World New York? Woohoo!
posted by sudama (10 comments total)
 
Speaking of revivals, eod.com is back (it was offline for a few weeks while Greg dealt with a family emergency).
posted by fraying at 10:31 AM on January 25, 2001


A couple of weeks ago (after almost a year away). It's been a slow, rolling announcement just in case any off the PHP underpinnings turn on me. I let the 700 subscribers to the old email list know a couple of days ago, friends and family a week before that, a few interested parties a week before that. Still waiting for my service provider to put in a CNAME record in the DNS so all those worldnewyork.com hits go where they're supposed to, like the .org and .net domains already do.
posted by Mo Nickels at 11:04 AM on January 25, 2001


I found it through a slashdot comment you posted, and I can only reiterate that it's great to see the site up again. I can't wait to check out how you've opened it up to participation.

Unsolicited at-first-glance thoughts: I'm not too clear about what's going on in the small print under each quote. Where is the bold text coming from, and where is the other blue text coming from? I guess the bold is an editorial quip and the other is a summary of the article? Hmm, doesn't always seem to hold true. Also, the link back to the original article seems kind of hidden by the combination of text size, placement, and the small amount of link text. For those of us familiar with the old World New York, these teeny category pictures are such a tease! In all, it looks great.

posted by sudama at 11:35 AM on January 25, 2001


All comments are always welcome. I'm working on an about-this-site comment section as we type.

Yeah, the small bold blue text is really the headline to the article, my headline, though sometimes I quote from the article. It's also what shows up in my search result pages. Sometimes I editorialize there, sometimes I don't, it's inconsistent. Perhaps a little too random, but I think we'll keep the inconsistency for now.

What I wanted to do was make the actual extract (quote, if you prefer) the title but PHP-Nuke (the Slashdot-clone PHP framework I use) didn't like that. So, I did a few versions of the layout and during my trial runs I ran them past some people (including the traditional Big Headline over the small body) and this one scored best.

The small link back to the source bothers me, too. Look at some of the older entries and you'll see a) no explanatory text (lots of calls for that, bing, I added it) and b) the link back to the source is immediately after the extract in that same size type. I may go back to that yet: I whole-heartedly believe in attribution.

I should say a couple of things here, while I'm jabbering. First, a lot of what I've done design-wise (and it's by no means complete or perfect) is reactive. Reactive to the Slashdot model, yes, but mostly reactive to the PHP-Nuke model. I daresay there are zero PHP-Nuke sites that look much like mine: they've all got tons of nested tables, colored bars, borders, backgrounds and long, slow load times.

My goal, then was to have super-fast load times, build off the simplicity of the original World New York and defy, if not defeat, the PHP-Nuke design meme (and thus, I think, that of Slashdot). Whether I will succeed or not remains to be seen, but that is my goal.

I am not, however, a designer, but a bad art director and the worst sort of code hack, so it could all just end up a big mess of text. The extracts are really the point, not the design.
posted by Mo Nickels at 12:11 PM on January 25, 2001


I should also say: I like the way Matt's made the little "Post" buttons change to "Wait" when you click on them. Very clever.
posted by Mo Nickels at 12:12 PM on January 25, 2001


Mo, you're absolutely correct, most other PHP Nuke powered sites look like Slashdot/Kuro5hin clones. You've done a great job!
posted by riffola at 8:01 PM on January 25, 2001


Thanks, riffola.
posted by Mo Nickels at 9:30 PM on January 25, 2001


Mo--sweet.

Your colophon says you use Utopia, free from Microsoft. Utopia's not in the free Microsoft fonts I have, nor can I find it on the MS typography site. I have the Adobe version, so this doesn't matter much to me directly, but is MS really giving it away? Where?
posted by rodii at 9:51 PM on January 25, 2001


You're right. It's Georgia that I had in mind, which is also the second choice in my font face tags. I think I prefer Georgia, but it's so common. In fact it's so common I was thinking of going back to Times, the newly neglected font of choice.
posted by Mo Nickels at 12:52 AM on January 26, 2001


I'm sick of Verdana and Georgia too, but they work so well on screen. I wish Adobe would give away Myriad Web--I think that works great on screen.

But we digress.
posted by rodii at 12:28 PM on January 26, 2001


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