I have mixed feelings about the new release. On the one hand, i love the emphasis on images, the site is much less “texty” and I think the pictures make a big impact. So that part is awesome and wonderful, kudos to everyone who made it happen.
A couple of things though:
1) I really miss the “more” buttons that used to be at the end of the recommended list and the the community spotlight sections. Could we have those back? That was a really intuitive place to find them.
2) I noticed that “more” functionality now does exist in the new News and Community pulldowns. Again, I love how the tiny image icons are next to each story in the list, they make the stories POP, and then there is the more button that I want. Keep the buttons on these new pulldowns, those are great, but put them back again too where they used to be. Make the restored links just be an extra entry point to the same functionality that already exists once you select it from the News and Community pulldowns. I hope that makes sense. I don’t think that should be so difficult.
But here’s the really critical part! Right now, when you press “more” you go to a page that is similar to the front page where essentially the “intro part” (using the old terminology) is shown. And that is a pain to wade through “partially expanded” diaries. I would rather just get another list in the same “condensed form” that you see from the news and community pulldowns: just show the title of the diary and the small icon. The net effect would be to get another page that is a rather long list of diaries, just as is shown for the RECENT DIARIES part on the Home page. It would make it very easy to skim a lot of diaries to find the ones that look interesting, and then we can use the same metaphor to click on a link to obtain the expanded form.
We need to be able to wade to lots of data to find what we want, I think what I am asking for would make it much easier, and since I think you should be able to leverage from existing code for the RECENT DIARIES on the home page, it shouldn’t be so difficult to do. That’s always easy to say though, I don’t know the actual code.
Anyhoo, thanks for considering this.