Brownstoner 2.0 Coming At You Today
After months of planning, we’re going to be launching the first significant upgrade of the site later this morning. While the overall look at feel won’t change too much, there will be a few noticeable differences: 1) readers will be able to create user profiles that track their comments, forum posts and responses to forum…
After months of planning, we’re going to be launching the first significant upgrade of the site later this morning. While the overall look at feel won’t change too much, there will be a few noticeable differences: 1) readers will be able to create user profiles that track their comments, forum posts and responses to forum posts; 2) registered users will also be able to upload photos to the forum; 3) all the renovation blogs will stream into a centralized reno blog so you don’t have to (though you still can) check each one individually. In addition, we’ve tried to make searching the site’s archives by topic and neighborhood a little easier. Oh yeah, the site should load faster too.
While we encourage everyone to sign up for a profile and use it as the primary way to interact with the site, it will still be possible to make anonymous comments. That said, anonymous comments will appear in a lighter font than comments from logged-in users. The hope is that regular commenters can establish credibility (and not have their identities stolen) while purposefully disruptive anonymous comments can be easily spotted and discounted.
This first step into a web 2.0 world will lay the groundwork for a bunch of other new functionalities in the upcoming months, including the ability for anyone to start a renovation blog and the creation of a map-based archive of the 2,000 or so property-related posts we’ve written over the past two and a half years.
The site upgrade will start around 10:30 this morning. Access to the site should not be interupted, but any comments or forum posts made between that time and when we tell you it’s complete (hopefully only a couple of hours) will be lost.
Look forward to hearing everyone’s feedback.
Mr. B
The site is slightly less user-friendly now. For example, before you could post anonymously without doing anything. Now you at least have to click on something in order to sign in as a “guest”. This is just stupid. I actually liked the site better the way it was before.
To cater to us over-50-year olds, suggest that the point-size of navigation text not be near-zero. This is a typical web design failure, presumably because it looks good.
On forum post, the word text box size is way too small (smaller than this one.) It would be difficult to enter a longish post (or is that the intention?)
From design perspective, the home-forum-reno navigation detracts from the nice heading image. I’dve put them on where they used to be, below the image.
Finally, if you still have the multi-posting problem (won’t know till I submit, but I suspect you do by your advocating patience above,) get a new designer! As one who designs html myself, it is trivial to disable the Post button once clicked, so you can’t do it more than once (till refresh.)
Otherwise, good evolutionary design.
Well, I can tell you one thing right now, this site is no more secure than it was before. In fact, it’s arguably less so.
I registered yesterday but never received the email to validate. So I am registered but cannot login so I am banished to faint font land. Username: Anonyme
So, why aren’t Ditmas Park and Midwood included in the drop down list of neighborhoods?
I like this new system and only wish it could have been implemented sooner. All good things take time, I suppose.
spanishfish, he will allow anonymous comments because many of this site’s visitors would leave otherwise.
Looks great!
I don’t really understand why you would still be allowing anonymous posts. Can a website form be added to the profile?