Jill back

Due to popular demand, we have returned Jackhammer Jill to the logo.

More at Boing Boing

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nixiebunny

You seem to have made a few other minor changes as well.
- http://bhtooefr.org/ Eric Rucker
  
  Looks like the new design breaks pretty badly on Opera:
  - http://deansli.st/ Dean Putney
    
    Interestink. Will fix. It looks like the only thing broken there is the header, the rest looks correct.
    
    Edit: Should be fixed now. Thanks!
    - penguinchris
      
      Is “New Disqus” not supposed to work in Safari?
      
      With the redesign I’m now finally able to log in to BB with Chrome again, my usual browser, so I guess it doesn’t matter but I’m writing this comment in Safari and may continue to use Safari for BB (which is the only thing I use it for)… I just wish I could finally downvote people from here.
      - http://giannii.com/ Michael Giannii Calvert
        
        What version of Safari and OS X are you using?
      - penguinchris
        
        @giannii:disqus The latest… 10.8.1 and Safari 6.0
    - noah django
      
      please make Activity visible again so I can follow my threads. pics related. this has been happening to me since before the new design, btw, but worked yesterday before Antinous switched back to old Disqus [shrugs] mac OS 10.5.8/firefox latest.
      also, on the main page, J is skipping over any post that doesn’t have a picture. seemed like it was working properly yesterday, though. it wasn’t working at all for me for like a week prior and has not worked reliably since MovableType days :[
  - http://twitter.com/PeterNGreen Peter Green
    
    I’m seeing exactly the same effect in Firefox 15.0.1. The bottom half of the links in the banner are chopped off. FWIW I preferred the visual interest of the random grey pattern to the new sky blue background, which looks a bit boring.
    
    It also appears that I have to log out and then in again (with Twitter) to post each separate comment, but that might be something to do with all the tracking blockers I have enabled. I’ll have to look into that tomorrow.
http://pineappledonut.org Lachlan Musicman

And as per most design changes around here, it looks great and keeps me feeling fresh. Great work. Now, back to wonderful things.
mtdna

Dear BoingBoing,

Let me be the first to express my outrage that you’ve changed your site design.

Sincerely,
Mr. Troll
- CpnCodpiece
  
  It looks like a mobile version of the site. I’m all for large margins in a design layout, but there is difference between white space and wasted space.
http://twitter.com/MTeson Marcelo Teson

It’s really interesting. It reminds me of earlier BB layouts in terms of philosophy, but modern and clean without harsh blinky stuff. http://web.archive.org/web/20050603074453/http://boingboing.net/
- http://boingboing.net/ Rob Beschizza
  
  Yup. :D
BDiamond

Love that JJ is back, hate the new design.
- Ipo
  
  You’re supposed to. It’s a tradition.
  - Ipo
    
    Funny to have gotten my first down-vote for this good-natured comment.
    
    Was the functionality to be able to see who liked/voted removed in order to protect down-voters from retaliation?
    At times I quite liked to be able to see who liked which comments.
    - penguinchris
      
      In Safari (at least for me) Old Disqus is still loading, so I can see who liked your comment (I always check when I like a comment myself, as I did with yours). I too will be sad if that functionality is lost.
      
      Actually, I wonder if since Old Disqus doesn’t know about downvotes the person who downvoted is in the list of likers?
      
      Here’s the list for your comment:
        Ito Kagehisa
        UFIA
        penguinchris
        Gyrofrog
        GoatLordMessiah
        devophill
        Dean Putney
      and 13 guests
      :)
      - Antinous / Moderator
        
        I switched back to old Disqus.
- benher
  
  That they even Contemplated removing Jill? That they even thought of havin’ them thoughts thought up? Shit… Try and take Jill’s finger, she take a fathuhfuckuh’s head!
theophrastvs

so this is “we’re just kidding we haven’t really returned to 1998 era web-design” week, yes?
(the vast fields of empty sky-blue and half-cut-off header text line are particularly evocative. ooo, and with every refresh a curious new page layout. and voting other comments up results in a 0 going to -1. so much for firefox 18.0a1 heh… good luck guys… i sympathize)
Carl_Brutanananadilewski

As somebody that reads Boing Boing on a large screen tv with massively sized fonts, I love the new layout. The previous one placed the main text in a column that covered less than 1/3 of the vertical aspect of the page because every time I increased the font size the column would get smaller. Glad to see Jill is back, not that I noticed she was gone because she was back to work before I even noticed she was gone.
marilove

The blue is very bright… very blue…
Grey Devil

]: I don’t like change.

lol, i actually don’t mind the new site design, though the header is not displaying correctly for me and i kind of wish the blue background wasn’t so terribly plain. But hey, i love the site anyway.
gyp

j/k and endless scrolling, o/
idkid

Also not a fan of the re-redesign. I don’t even get a header displayed. (Only if I open a story on a new tab or window in Firefox 15.0.1.) Why do we need big margins of any color? It’s just wasted space. The articles, thankfully, are not. Keep trying….
- Ito Kagehisa
  
  I always try turning off adblock, flashblock, noscript and a few special gadgets I normally run before I decide that a site has a lot of wasted space… it might look different, even though of course all BB advertizers know that the site admin work hard to force us to see all the ads, of course of course. Of course!
Kommkast

I do love the new layout.. but can I suggest a darker color? Much easier on the eyes..
Senor Schaffer

I’m confused and angry.
- benher
  
  The blue does not calm you?
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    I hate blue almost as much as I hate pandas.
    - TwilightNewsSite
      
      AFAIK, all current, on-trend web design is white-on-white, meaning that the blue background should probably be grey.
    - wysinwyg
      
      I’m really glad to hear I’m not alone on this pandas issue.
      - Antinous / Moderator
        
        They look like Juggaloes.
- http://halfbakedmaker.org Robert Baruch
  
  It makes me scared and disoriented!
http://grumer.org/ Avram Grumer

Nice! Simple, elegant, clutter-free.
http://twitter.com/BricePuls Brice Puls

Is the header supposed to appear on the main page? Because I only see it when I click through.
- http://deansli.st/ Dean Putney
  
  That’s correct. The header appears only on permalink pages.
  - edkedz
    
    Weird. What’s the thinking behind that?
    - rprivetera
      
      That the top of the main page is over 50% ads vs content and the header would disturb that ratio?
      
      Seriously, I love BB, but all this whitespace isn’t doing anything but lighting up my room.
  - t3kna2007
    
    Really curious what led to the header being called #dickbar. :)
Uhclem

I loved Jill since I was getting her on floppy disks from you guys. Nice to have her back
Ipo

Increasing font-size cuts off the bottom of the page.
- http://deansli.st/ Dean Putney
  
  We’ve also added support for scroll bars!
  - Ipo
    
    You thought I was joking.
    - http://deansli.st/ Dean Putney
      
      What are you viewing this on? Shoot me an email at dean@boingboing.net, please.
      - Ipo
        
        I was just about to do that, but I can’t recreate the bug today.
        I’m sorry.
        NOT!
        Was using latest stable Kubuntu/Firefox.
        My problem persisted after reboot and with a clean browser, so I think y’all fixed it.
- Ipo
  
  It is necessary to increase font-size because it loads like this. Itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny.
  I don’t have an IMAX beamer.
- http://www.ikaink.net Itsumishi
  
  Once again, trying to zoom in to make reading comments easier just makes the adds on the right hand side take over the main column, so the font size does get bigger, but every comment gets extra long and skinny.
An Infinitude of Tortoises

Would that returning Jackhammer Jill were the only thing done to the site!

Unfortunately, however, you’ve also “upgraded” (ahem) to Disqus 2012, thereby abandoning OpenID as a log-in option. Hey, who needs open standards, anyhow, right? Not when our ~~corporate overlords~~ friends at Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, and of course Disqus itself are there, eager to be of service.

Oh, but it gets better. As a Firefox user with what I trust is a fairly typical add-ons collection, configured in a fairly typical way, here’s what I have to do merely to see the comments: via NoScript enable two Blocked Objects (not a persistent setting, alas) and completely disable RefControl (no per-page referrer option seems to work). Formerly, the comments were visible upon loading the page.

What a hassle! Well, at least there’s still the BoingBoing login option; otherwise, this comment — and any future comments from me — would not exist. A giant leap backward, this one.

And by the way, I do like that shade of blue.
- An Infinitude of Tortoises
  
  I note that the default comment sort order is now “Best”.
  
  Ah, Science!
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    I can’t figure out how to set the comment sort to Oldest First as default, which is what we had before. I also can’t figure out how to set the comment box at the bottom of the thread so that we might at least pretend that people read the thread before commenting. I’ve asked for help and am awaiting a reply. It appears that Disqus 2012, like every other Disqus upgrade, removes large chunks of functionality.
    
    We are not amused.
    
    Moderator note: As you can see, I’ve switched back. (Or some of you will have no idea what we’re talking about.) The comment box fixed at the top, the change in default sort order and the fact that the page would only load 30 comments initially (versus the 250 that we had previously) all seemed like encouraging people to comment without bothering to read the thread, thus the death of conversation in favor of Twitter-style announcificating.
    - http://www.facebook.com/people/Mark-Duanburge/100000313244887 Mark Duanburge
      
      Did you figure out that you needed to click on “Discussion” to sort the discussions by “best/newest/oldest” yet ;-) ? Regarding JJ, I too didn’t notice she left, however I can’t help but see that she is a four-eyed, bear-clawed freak!
      - Antinous / Moderator
        
        Not for myself. To change defaults for the site.
      - http://twitter.com/funkyfresh funkyfresh
        
        According to their FAQ: Sort order: sort order is a user setting (via cookie) and is not admin customizable.
      - http://www.zazzle.com/InfinitudeTortoises* An Infinitude of Tortoises
        
        ”Progress.”
    - edkedz
      
      “I’ve switched back”
      
      Bravo. You should really keep it that way; pretty much nothing about the new version (of Disqus, that is) was an improvement in any way. Replacing the “likes” with the “vote up” arrows sucked too.
    - http://www.zazzle.com/InfinitudeTortoises* An Infinitude of Tortoises
      
      Congratulations! Sanity prevails. I happily return to OpenID posting and encourage others to join me. As the extra descriptive text next to my name suggests, I’ve been complaining about Disqus 2012′s lack of OpenID support for a while now, specifically since RawStory made the unfortunate switch. Raw seems perfectly content to do without OpenID and refers complaints about its absence to Disqus. Disqus in turn suggests logging in via Disqus instead — most amusing. I only hope this sends them a message that not everyone is willing to settle for an “upgrade” worse that what it replaces. Perhaps they can unbreak what was broken in time for a “Disqus 2013″….
Bad Juju

Defaulting to ‘best’ comments higher vs Oldest or Newest took me a second..
I suppose as long as the redesign isn’t anywhere near as clumsy as Gawker’s hot mess, you’re golden.
http://www.facebook.com/people/David-Horton/100001980195134 David Horton

Renders fine in Chrome. I might assume the sky blue is a placeholder that can be replaced on the slightest whim. I like that the web is liquid, and that design changes can be improvements. Good on ya.
Boundegar

All change is bad. Why, back in my day we got our BoingBoing by pony express, and then we got to pet the pony. Also, you kids get off my lawn.
edkedz

I was annoyed to notice that the comments had been re-ordered in (some unknown notion of) “best,” (to “worst,” I assume) rather than the natural order which they should always be in, oldest to newest. (Heh)
(At least, as of now, changing it back to my preference seems to have stuck.)
TwilightNewsSite

Usability guy joke:

Q: “How did God create the world in only 7 days?”

A; “Easy — no installed user base.”
rprivetera

So unless I open to maximum width I don’t get all the header entries, and if do, half the browser is blank with no text in it but a single narrow column in the middle? is that right?
- mappo
  
  The wider and shorter computer monitors get, the taller and narrower websites get. It’s progress.
Halloween_Jack

WHAR MY CHEEZ WHAR WHAAAAAAAAAAAR
David Llopis

j = down, k = up still works on the homepage o/
thequickbrownfox

Could we have Jill loading more “wondrous” things, instead of “wonderful” things?
viadd

It screws up on my iPad, cutting off the right side of the comments (blatted over by the skyscraper ads, and by the white space that consumes my screen space below them.)

On the left side, it only covers up half of each avatar with the like/tweet/etc icons.

But there is still a solid 40% of the screen that has ~50 consecutive ungarbled characters on each line before the next truncation. (For for the initial comment of a thread: the indents on the replies bring that number down somewhat.) You can do worse, and probably will.
http://www.propaganda.com David Lawrence

It’s nicely responsive — looks great at any page size. The typography could stand some tweakage at wider page widths (slightly bigger maybe?) and maybe looser margins, but nice work overall.
http://marrickvillian.blogspot.com/ Al Corrupt

Nice do-over. I see you used a quite a few tins of #FFFFFF in the redesign.
- http://www.facebook.com/people/Mark-Duanburge/100000313244887 Mark Duanburge
  
  Uses less bandwidth to deliver white pages, just like when you print out the page it uses less ink.
  - Ipo
    
    Haha!
    Wait, are you serious?
    - http://www.spockosbrain.com spocko
      
      Yes. Also since. White space uses less bits the entire site weighs less. I took an old page design and downloaded it to my hard drive and weighed it. Then I downloaded a new design page and weighed it. The new page weighed 27% less. My old hard drive was getting too heavy for my machine, but now it won’t fall through the floor! Thanks BB!
      - Ito Kagehisa
        
        If you have an old monitor, though, it uses more power to render whitespace. You’ll need a new monitor with the extra factory whiteness loaded in. Of course that will make it weigh a little more, but these new flat screens are so light you’ll never notice.
      - http://www.spockosbrain.com spocko
        
        This is so true. Lots of people don’t know this. They also don’t know that you need to clear the monitor cache regularly to prevent unsightly whiteness build up. I flush mine once a week. If I didn’t the whiteness would look terrible and the monitor would get so heavy I would need a concrete reinforced desk to hold it.
      - Ipo
        
        Just install an automatic bilge pump.
        I use sliding weights for my color balance.
flwombat

Saw the new design first on my iPhone (where I usually experience boingboing) and thought it looked excellent! Looking at it on my actual computer now and I think it looks nice there too, if a tiny bit confusing not to have the top navigation bar on the main screen, but whatever, I found exactly what I wanted very quickly so it’s all good.
Plut0

Everything looks so much better when I zoom to 90%. Also in Opera the header seems to be missing on the front page.
http://twitter.com/drcabl3 Thomas Walpole

Love the new layout, especialy the j/k, but when i hit the top of the page with k, i drop to the bottom. is this a feature or a bug?(I prefer it without, so I can use k to get to the top of the page)
http://www.jimdraws.com Thorzdad

I’m not a huge fan of Disqus-based commenting, and I’m very surprised BB has gone so heavily for Disqus considering Disqus’ business model is far from anything one could consider “open”. At least I can still use my BB login, though. A lot of sites that have gone for Disqus also abandoned their own login.

The nav header only being on permalink pages is really strange. Without a banner, the front page looks incomplete…like it hasn’t fully loaded, especially since the site logo itself is so tiny.
- http://giannii.com/ Michael Giannii Calvert
  
  What’s your definition of “open” when it comes to commenting?
failquail

Well i greatly approve of this redesign for use on my work laptop at least.

The old design frequently locked up firefox for many seconds at a time when initially loading the page or loading new content when at the bottom. This new redesign is wondrously speedy instead :D
Glaurung_quena

On my iPad, the comments are half covered by the advertising bar in the right margin – I can read the left part of each line of text and the rest is behind the right margin ad banner.
Joey

She has not blessed the mobile site.
DMStone

It looks like this might be a repost:
http://boingboing.net/2011/07/12/internet-angered-by.html
- Ipo
  
  Did he mean to write MineCrunch?
AllyPally

What happened to next/previous? JKL doesn’t work for me on Safari or on Firefox.
- Kludgegrrl
  
  JK does work for me, but as of today I notice that it is erratic… J usually goes to the next entry, but sometimes skips one or a few — which is actually worse than not working at all.
Sparrow

It looks like the update broke the archives. When I click on a past date in the archives, I get a link like http://boingboing.net/2012/09/01 but the current date loads.
http://www.ikaink.net Itsumishi

I like the redesign. It looks better and more elegant than the previous reincarnation. Only two minor things are bothering me.

1) For some reason, in Chrome at least when using Ctrl+F to find words, Disqus highlights the words, but won’t jump to them along the page.

2) When zooming in, the adds on the righthand side grow at the expense of the main column, which makes reading articles and comments far more difficult for those with poor eyes or big monitors.
- SamSam
  
  1) For some reason, in Chrome at least when using Ctrl+F to find words, Disqus highlights the words, but won’t jump to them along the page.
  
  Bwaaa!!! I hadn’t discovered that yet. Absolutely reproducible on Mac Chrome 21, and absolutely a bad bug. Similarly, on Firefox, Find does jump, but not to the actual words (i.e. the word you jumped to is not visible). Safari seems to work, though.
  - http://giannii.com/ Michael Giannii Calvert
    
    Hi I’m G from Disqus. I’m definitely seeing the same thing and I’ll have someone look into it.
    - http://www.ikaink.net Itsumishi
      
      Well I’m not sure whether it was Disqus changing things or BoingBoing going for a different version (it certainly looks different to last time I logged in) but it’s fixed.
      
      Thanks to whoever sorted that out!
    - http://www.zazzle.com/InfinitudeTortoises* An Infinitude of Tortoises
      
      Cool. And while you’re at it, maybe you could look into restoring OpenID, too…?
SamSam

Discus bugs aside (and there are many of them, like having to click twice on a message box to get focus), I like the redesign a lot. Nice and clear, and I like that it is just (or at least seems to be) CSS changes, and you haven’t significantly redesigned the notion that it’s just a scrolling blog.

Please never go the Gawker/Lifehacker/whatever route of making articles impossible to find.
- http://giannii.com/ Michael Giannii Calvert
  
  What kind of issues have you been experiencing with Disqus?
  - http://www.zazzle.com/InfinitudeTortoises* An Infinitude of Tortoises
    
    With Disqus 2012?
    (1) Lack of OpenID support.
    (2) Having to completely disable the Firefox add-in RefControl to see the comments, and well as manually unblocking two Blocked Objects via NoScript. (In the original Disqus, the comments were just there.)
    (3) Inability by the admin to set a global default sort order.
    (4) Did I mention the lack of OpenID? Oh, yep.
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      According to our analytics, we’re getting comments via OpenID.
      - http://www.zazzle.com/InfinitudeTortoises* An Infinitude of Tortoises
        
        See there, G — it’s not just me; there’s a whole class of users your Disqus 2012 is shutting out. (The open-standards people, I’d like to think.)
  - Ipo
    
    When I expand somebodies profile and then open the activities tab it stays blank.
    Used to work. The link still does.
    - SamSam
      
      Seconded.
    - Ito Kagehisa
      
      Thirded.
    - Ito Kagehisa
      
      Still broken 2012-09-21 using current Firefox.
Shibi_SF

Ack. It’s Monday morning and BoingBoing is all sorts of weird. This discombobulates me.
celina192

The site design is okay but the main page kinda sucks guys. Measuring the actual space the content takes up results in 610 pixels wide. not even using half my screen to display my content and it feels horrible to read with that spacing. Please do something about it.

EDIT: Holy crap I just read some others and remembered I had ad block on, with adblock off and the ads taking up ever more horizontal space the content is now only 380 pixels wide. wtf.

EDIT: Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/bU4Wv.png
- http://www.jimdraws.com Thorzdad
  
  Profit!
Phoc Yu

I like how the site looks with adblock/noscript now. And the pattern is better than just the baby blue from last night. But holy hell, turning those extensions off makes the site remind me of watching Headline News or CNBC: “Dude, where’s my news?” The 7 ads (including blinking ads…really?) completely surrounding the “content” plus the social media crap almost made this page’s one-liner disappear.

My biggest suggestion would be to nix the little “share this” bug on the left after one scrolls past the article. Why can’t that go in the content-free margins? Scrolling through pages of comments isn’t suddenly going to make me change my mind that the article is “shareable”. Plus, it takes up too wide a space in the comments area, meaning we’re scrolling more and more just to get through the comments. Also, it makes the comments further right-justified in the content whitespace, making me think I’ve missed the parent comment.
- SamSam
  
  It’s true, the comments are awfully far over to the right. I hadn’t twigged to this yet, but several times today I’ve scrolled up to find out what a comment’s parent comment was, only to realize I was on the first-level indentation.
  
  It also means that the third-level comments get even more narrow than they used to be.
bluest_one

No more downvoting?

Relentless positivity it is then!

ಠ_ಠ
- echolocate chocolate
  
  Downvoting just results in lack of conversation and repression of unpopular comments. I would hate to see the comments on boing boing end up like reddit, a cesspool of tedious memes and privileged whining. Any more than it already is.
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    Ar.
Quibbler

Loading comments makes my work computer go into BSOD mode.
Tyler Nichols

SO – the mobile version of this site is completely FUBAR on iOS 5.11 / iPhone.
Oh – it formats ‘correctly’ and rotates fine, but there are still problems:

1) No more “full site” link that I can see – I *loathe* the mobile versions of websites. I have a phone with a good enough resolution and scaling tools to use the desktop layout just fine, so I demand this of websites I visit.
2) Whether UAFaker is broken on 5.11 or you guys have found a way around it, my old standby of jailbreaking so I can change the user agent string coming from MobileSafari no longer convinces you to not serve a mobile version of your website. This wouldn’t be a problem except for #1 above.
3) Pinch / double tap to zoom has been disabled by the layout of the mobile site. You have images on your website that render postage stamp size on the mobile version of boingboing. I wish to zoom in to see the detail on these but cannot.
4) The black menu banner on permalinked pages “floats” with you as you scroll. Thats 1 full centimeter of height lost when reading in landscape mode, leaving only about 7 lines of text at the huge font size the mobile version of boingboing uses. It’s still there in portrait orientation as well, but the relative loss is not as bad then.

Again – I have a powerful web browser on my phone precisely because I *DON’T* want to be limited to a “mobile” version of theinternet – please give me back the full BoingBoing on my phone!

Also – the black menu floating as it does interacts poorly with using page up/dn or spacebar to scroll in Firefox (and presumably other browsers) on my PC. If I press spacebar to scroll down, the first line or two of text that should be visible end up underneath the menu, meaning I have to scroll back up a little bit manually.

That said – I do in general approve of the wider cleaner look and new non-flat blue background.
(edited for typos and to cut down on rantiness).
Susan Carley Oliver

I love the Security Envelope Blue.

I hate that the floating header eats a line or two of text every time I page down.

Happy that Jill is back, happy we’re not going with up/down voting.