Freethought Blogs is now back up — with our long-awaited new design!
We’re very excited about this. We encourage you all to explore all the blogs — and in particular, we encourage you to explore the sniny new home page for the whole network, with categories and everything!
And now that the switch-over has happened, we can start adding new bloggers again! We have a few already waiting in the wings — I’m sure you’re going to be very excited to meet them. They’ll be coming very soon.
We’re sure there will be some bumps in the transition, as there always are. (If there aren’t, that might actually be a bad thing: it would probably be a sign of the impending Apocalypse, which would make this whole atheism blog network kind of a moot point, wouldn’t it?) Please do let us know if you run into problems (here’s our technical support page), and please be patient during the transition. Enjoy!
Out of curiosity, and assuming it’s something that’s not a private matter – why put off bringing in new bloggers til after the redesign? (No criticism or challenge meant, I just don’t have any likely reasons for it popping into my not-yet-informed head.)
Simply for curiosity purposes, is there a reason you used the word “sniny” both in the title and the body text? Using it once would seem like a typo, but twice makes me think there’s some inside joke I’m missing.
Wholly Carp, I can actually read this on my phone! I couldn’t do that on the old site without considerable resizing and tweaking for each page.
Kind of a shame the “FTB Recent” feature on the sidebar seems to be gone. I liked that, it was nice to see what was a hot topic on the network. But small potatoes in the end.
I am *so* glad that you guys have a new design, especially the front page, which has been grating on my nerves for ages. The fact that it was arranged by the order that each blog had been added caused some serious problems, especially since it wound up prioritizing some of the less active bloggers. I do think that it needs some work. I’d start with putting something at the top which shows FTB’s most recent entries, and maybe a listing of all the topics that follow. Nobody’s going to scroll down to see each and every one of those topics.
I’m also a little unsure about the sans serif font, which feels a little small to me, and I think is a little thin. It doesn’t feel like it was designed for middle-aged people to read.
But other than those things, I am really delighted to see the change, and even more delighted that we’ll be getting more voices around here.
I like the new layout for the individual blogs.
The front page, not so much. It’s cluttered, and it has multiple repeats of posts because they are classified in different topics.
This is my preference only, I realize, but I’d rather see more of the new posts per blog, rather than all lumped by topic. The old format had the disadvantage that it only showed the two most recent posts for any particular blog. The new format means that depending on when one browses to the front page, the new posts by a particular blogger might get completely missed.
It is much cleaner, though, which I like, and I haven’t had a chance to try it on any of my mobile devices yet.
@Jeff Engle: At a(n educated) guess, the migration process isn’t 100% automated, so adding new bloggers around the time of the transition would have required setting up their blogs under the old system, then doing additional work to move them to the new system. Presumably, waiting a few days to a couple weeks was deemed the most expedient option.
Was the Ad-Free option there before? Well, now I’ve found it and am so grateful! Worth the $30 to me!
Sniny…. originally a title typo PZ Myers made a few years ago for a shiny trophy he got that he carried forward… so yes an inside joke. 🙂
Love the redesign! Now I can read FTB articles on my Android tablet without crashing the browser. Woot!
[…] Freethought Blogs Is Back Up – With A Sniny New Design! (Greta Christina’s Blog) […]
This new layout is slightly better than the last one, where I had to resort to CSS overrides just to read anything. Better logo, too. (I’m sorry, but that giant “FTB” ligature reminded me of a bloody tampon.)
It looks good on Firefox 3 and up, but on Firefox 2 and Opera 9 the entire content column gets pushed below the sidebar to the very bottom of the screen.
@ 2 Spencer Dub
As fly44d said, comes from here:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/06/07/oooh-shiny-1/