After more than 15 years with basically the same layout, the Realclimate website – while still functional – has become increasing anachronistic both in appearance and ‘under the hood’. In order to take advantage of more up to date web-site designs and new features that have been developed since the early 2000s (!), we need to upgrade the site, and while we are at it, update the theme and design, while maintaining an aesthetic link to the original.
With this post, we can reveal the new layout.
The differences are not related to content but to appearance – all of the material is still here – but the new layout is much fresher and includes much better support for people reading the site on their phones or iPads. We are using larger typefaces, cleaner menus and a more content-focused presentation for posts.
All of this is intended to improve the reader/commenter experience, but it’s inevitable that we have missed some aspects and/or some of the design features may be suboptimal for some. We will endeavor to fix any issues or problems that you find. So please comment below if you like it or hate it, if you find anything that’s broken or if you have any specific requests for tweaks. We’ll try and iterate over the next few days to get it right.
Thanks!
The inability to choose a particular section of comments when there are hundreds of comments on a thread is a step backward. To get to the most recent comments, we have to laboriously go to the end of each page, click on “newer comments,” wait for that page to load, and repeat the process, up to 10 or 14 times for the thicker threads. It makes it harder than using the old version.
This looks nice but totally doesn’t work. They have shot themselves in the foot!
Maybe it will evolve?
Search “Atlantic meridional” using the Search box on this site: no hits. Search “Atlantic meridional” site:realclimate.org using Google: 106 hits. Yes, something is definitely broken in this redesign.
There are pages, just like before. No numbers, unfortunately, but they are grouped by pages. That plus Ctrl+F will get you where you want to go.
Ctrl + F won’t work on tablets and mobile phones
Good point, Barton. Redesigns rarely turn out better. Always more clicks away to do the same task.
The “new” look is a complete surprise! Thx to all of you for publishing and curating Real Climate!
I don’t use a phone, have a nice large desktop screen, and now when I come to RealClimate I see that large screen filled with a large logo and one article title and a small amount of text – plus a significant portion of the screen filled with an invitation to give an email address for email notifications (which I also will not be using).
Once I eventually manage to scroll down and find where recent comments are listed, the list is shorter than it used to be, so it is harder to know which articles are currently active in the comments section.
And once I get to the comments thread I want to try to follow, the comments no longer have numbers on them. so it is harder to follow the back-and-forth of multiple disjoint conversations.
On the bad side, comments threads here are getting less and less useful as they get choked up by a small number of posters that treat the site as an electronic version of Hyde Park’s Speakers’ Corner. The changes in the user interface will make it even harder to ignore the uninformed, repetitious rants of Those That Shall Not Be Named. Less content spread across more screens means more time spent scrolling, trying to see if I can find a pony in the pile of….
Not a good change, IMHO. I understand the desire to make things better for people that use phones, but reducing everyone else to the serious limitations of a phone interface is a modern IT idea that does not bode well for the future.
Agreed
Love the new bigger typeface; so many of us are getting older so this is a real boon!
Shame we’re unable to block the sexist denier trolls that are still appearing though.
1. Anyone else seeing the site in Finnish?
2. Search function is not working.
Quite a surprise to see the new site after all these years. I am agnostic on the changes, but appreciate that it took some serious effort on your part.
Cheers
Patience, people!
I just tested out the “reply” function, which seems to work well. Don’t know yet how those sub-threads will be structured…if they will be compressed to save column-inches…but if so, scrolling will be easier.
I might tweak some details, but you can’t get to 2.0 until you have some real-world experience with the beta and 1.0. (I just picked up the language; I’m not a code-monkey myself.)
So play around with various features a little and see what adjustments you can make yourself and then maybe there will be a consensus on changes.
…and I am testing out “reply” here.
Guess what? You can reply to an individual comment, instead of just adding a comment at the end.
That makes it easier to find comments that are responding directly to another comment.
It also makes it nearly impossible to find all the new comments. They can now appear anywhere in the sequence. Scattered amongst the older ones that needed to be ignored when they were first posted, and are even less useful now. Just way too much blank space in the screen real estate, so it is going to be way too much effort to read a thread – if you haven’t been coming back to it every few hours so that the “New Comments” links cover what you have missed.
Given that there are often long moderation delays, trying to weed through many screens of stuff to see if someone added a reply to an old comment just isn’t going to work for me.
Of course, since I am entering this as a reply to an early comment in this thread, people that only look at the end for new comments probably won’t notice it!
My first impression, perhaps unsurprisingly, is negative. That might just be because I’m a grumpy old coot. But I agree in detail with BPL and Bob Loblaw. OTOH, I’m pleased to see the “instant preview” feature of the comment box is retained!
Seriously, if the new design makes it easier for the authors to keep the site active, I’m for it. None of you are here for my benefit, after all.
Suboptimal on a non-mobile screen. Leaves empty margins, and huge gaps between lines. The old version read like a journal article, whereas this one feels .. porous. Agree with everything said by @BobLoblaw. In addition, I miss the sidebar.
Use this for mobile maybe, but why break the desktop in the process?
Pass.
It has none of those deficiencies on my 2015 Macbook Air; I’m not sure how web designers can deal with different appearances on different platforms, but clearly it was designed for mine!
Just to put some numbers on it, prior to clicking on “reply”, 29% of the vertical space on my window was text to read (including white space between lines/paragraphs) , 16% was used up by three rows of sillouettes (white head on grey circle) + name + date/times stamp (2 lines per comment), and the remaining space is occupied by grey space, the reply links, etc.
Information density is low.
Hi Bob, we reduced the size of the header and brought back the sidebar. Please let us know if that’s better. – gavin
The main header seems slightly smaller (in height), and I see that the sidebar now has the old “with inline responses” part again, but otherwise I can’t notice any significant difference.
No matter how wide I make my browser window, the actual content (text) part of the comments only uses about 35% of the width of my screen. Once my window exceeds half my screen width (1920 pixels) I get no advantage in making it wider.
I’m sure there will be religious wars over whether the nested replies are good or bad. With so little content displayed on one screen, searching for new replies buried in the old ones will likely take time of O(n^2) as comment numbers increase.
Too much time scrolling. Not enough time reading.
Firefox 68.12.0esr on Linux, if it makes any difference. I might try another browser later.
P.S. If you click on the link in “Recent Comments” and you are not already on that page, you end up at the top of the page. To get to the comment you wanted to read, you need to either search/scroll, or click on the link in “Recent Comments” again.
This is pretty but useless!
We will still have the the same biased censorship that reduces this site to a mouthpiece for the fanatical global warmest.
“I wanted you guys to know that you’re free to use RC in any way you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful about what comments we screen through, …We can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or not, and if so, any comments you’d like us to include.
Think of RC as a resource that is at your disposal… We’ll use our best discretion to make sure the skeptics don’t get to use the RC comments as a megaphone.”
– Michael E. Mann, IPCC Lead Author (2001)
http://assassinationscience.com/climategate/1/FOIA/mail/0938018124.txt
JDS: “We will still have the the same biased censorship that reduces this site to a mouthpiece for the fanatical global warmest [sic].”
BPL: Not at all. You confuse managing a private web site with government suppression of free speech. This is a private platform, and has the right to remove any comments that are disruptive, repetitive, or otherwise troublemaking. If yours tend to fall into those categories, be more careful about what you write.
BTW, the epithet is “warmist.” “Warmest” means “the most warm.”
Looks great!
Overall I think the redesign is a welcome change! The ability to nest comment replies has been sorely missing for a long time. For some reason the site will randomly load in mobile/tablet mode on my desktop, but that’s a minor quibble.
I like the new design a lot, particularly the ability to reply, which I hope it will remove the clutter of endlessly repetitive arguments between people who feel entitled to “own” the comment section and the neverending troll feeding. It works on my MacBook, admittedly an older one.
I see both improvements and challenges in the new format. It’s quite possible the improvements outweigh the challenges.
Note to those complaining about the difficulty of getting to the most recent comments. There are still 50 comments on a page. Go to the bottom of the first page and click newer comments. Look at the web address. On the end, it says page=2. Replace the “2” with the nearest integral multiple of 50 less than the number of comments, add 1, and you well be on the page with the newest comments.
One possible issue. It is useful for comments to be numbered so that if you can easily cite a prior comment. As one may be mentioning multiple comments, the Reply is not a substitute for numbering.
Unfortunately, my guess is that the nesting of replies breaks any concept of numbering. What was the first 50 comments yesterday may be comments 1-46, 51-53, and 57 today, as people have added nested replies.
If you want to reply to several comments, you either can’t nest it, or you can break it up and do nested replies to each one (which magnifies the # of comments).
I see the removal of comment numbering as a feature, not a bug. We have had long-running distracting personal arguments from people who should start their own blogs rather than using RealClimate as a place to assert themselves. This will help, imnsho.
Yeah, we can get around it by referring to date/time stamps for a specific post.
The petty rivalries here are going to lead to some LOOOOONG, boring flame wars, but the fact that they are threaded perhaps makes it easier to scroll past without scorching one’s eyeballs.
Moving the pointer in the home-page after returning from article comments results in the home-page being reset to its top rather than where one was.
I agree with Bob Loblaw. I was not disturbed by the old design which was simply functional. And the format was more close to the severity of a scientific article than the above format. By the way, with the current necessary energetic sobriety, I think the old design was better.
Greater difficulty reaching the last several comments on the Forced Variations thread; no listing of recent comments in a sidebar.
Numbered comments highly useful for reference. Please return this feature.
—- from my iPad, where I never had any difficulty with the original format.
I like the look, and am not worried about the comment format; this threads more or less like Tamino’s “Open Mind,” and that was pretty functional once you adjusted. I think this will be the same story.
As far as seeing too small a portion of the page goes, I note that “view” functions work fine, so one can improve things simply by zooming out.
Instead of numbers, one can copy comment URLs and paste them directly, I think; here’s one to DBB’s last:
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2021/08/realclimate-redesign/#comment-793874
There does appear to be one glitch still in effect, though: the “sidebar” is appearing not as a sidebar to the main body, but as a sidebar to an otherwise empty ‘footer’ below it, which rather negates the whole point of a sidebar, I’d think.
Thanks for the update. On balance, I think once we get used to it, it’ll be fine. And it does look nice!
The threading at Tamino’s used to be inconvenient to me – if I hadn’t visited in a few days and the comment section was long, I’d start at the top and use my browser’s search function to find all the comments dated after the last one I read. Not too difficult. And no matter how many comments there are, you only have to search one page.
The threading helps if you are reading the comments from start to end, where dates don’t matter as much as the content, but they make it harder to find new stuff when you just want to catch up on the most recent 10% of the discussion.
The huge difference at Tamino’s though, is that the discussion is strongly moderated for content. Most of the comments are worth reading. I don’t even bother with the Forced Responses here any more, and Unforced Variations is just a quick scan looking for anything from the few commenters still worth reading. I’ll spend more time on comments to science blog posts, but even some of those end up in the usual stream of bat’s piss, which makes it hard to find the gleaming shaft of gold shining in the moonlight..
In the Usenet days, decent news readers had kill files, so the dross was much easier to weed out. If the new RC site included some sort of built-in kill file feature, I could easily cut out 80% of the comments I see.
I like the feature at Skeptical Science, where the entire contents of all new comments from all blog posts are available on one page (well, multiple pages, 50 at a time). I can see every new comment at once, and follow the links to the original posts and discussion if I need more context. Finding active discussions is easy, with a minimum of clicking and scrolling. My sequence there is 1) main page to find any new blog posts, 2) comments page to see what topics are being discussed.
the add on “killfile” works on Tamino’s website and allows a reader to hush or hide commenters if the reader is not interested in what a commenter has to say. I love that.
On Android phone
The screen maddeningly randomly jumps to the bottom of the page. Some shortcut, I guess. How can you see the previous action in Android (and if there is a god, how to kill the previous action so it never happens again)?
Ahh, that’s what’s doing it. Every time the screen autorotates it loses its place. Your bug or Android’s or..?
I like the ‘jump to comments’ button
There’s plenty of space so pease expand it to cover other stuff, too. ‘Add a comment’ comes to mind.
Suggestion:
Add a “Show me all comments in the last X days that I have not yet seen. Keep the list of stuff seen in cookies or, better, on your server by username. 30 days of history should be adequate.
Eh, new stuff is always foreign-feeling to some degree.
I wish you guys hadn’t been secretive about the effort. Remember how we users were discussing rebuilding the site? You had lots of talent available. Fortunately, we’re all still here (speaking generously).
LOVE, love, loooooooove the threading!
THANK YOU!
I like the larger size and spacing. I just set it to 150% to fill my screen. Easy on my old tired eyes. But I miss the sidebar a lot.
As with other commentators, i think the layout is clean but way too much whitespace, resulting in a lot scrolling. Paragraphs with a bottom margin of 24px? How about 6? Reply to individual comments is good though. The top banner size is controlling overall width of screen usage. I would rather see logo style than banner in a flex box so whole of screen used. At moment, I have screeds of blank space on both sides.
The new Reply function creates Comment Threads.
Which is good in one way, keeps themes together to be read more easily in context – and/or readers not interested the skip the entire thread od comments in one step.
But it also means, because these threads are not listed separately anywhere (such as Emails are, and the old Usenet system) the more recent replies will be lost in prior pages. Maybe that’s the reason behind the change, or the downside doesn’t matter. idk. It’s your call.
BUG?
When I click on a specific comment in the Recent Comments list panel – it takes me to the Comment in question, but then the page suddenly refreshes automatically back to the top of page. It’s hapened every time so far.
Using firefox on a computer.
Same.
Discovered an easy workaround for this: while the view jumps to the top of the post, the comment-specific URL remains in the search box. Just put your cursor there, press enter, and the screen jumps back to the appropriate comment and stays put.
An annoyance, but only a very slight one.
Thanks for the tip: this works for me. Hope this glitch can be fixed soon, however! Thanks for the ongoing work you guys are doing here at RealClimate!
As usual layout is the main enemy of content. We live in an age of image-nonsense.
Sorry to say – but the new design is pretty hopeless :(
That you have to scroll forever, just to get to the latest comment?
And it is impossible to get a quick overview.
Blogs are dead. Long live blogs!
LOL!
Maybe I’ll have more to say later, but the first thing that strikes me is that the comments are harder to read, for old eyes like mine, than they should be. Larger typeface – good! Font – a matter of taste but de gustibus non disputandum. But why put #666 text on #f6f5f2 background? Will using good ol’ black on white make the site seem, oh, less hip? From a design-is-identity standpoint I think you WANT to be science-y and straight-arrow, not woo woo look at our neat typeface and color scheme!
I appreciate all the work you put in to run Real Climate. I will get used to the new format.
This totally doesn’t work in my Google Chrome browser on my PC (HP laptop, 2020 build, latest Windows). All the sidebar stuff is down at the end, which is how it looks on my phone where that makes more sense. Also, the top menu bar disappears as soon as I move the mouse onto the page.
Ooh, I looked at in Firefox on my PC, nice, now I see the sidebar as an actual sidebar and the top menu line doesn’t vanish. Back to Chrome, I disabled all my blockers, reinstalled a completely fresh version, still get a nonfunctional front page.
How about MS Edge on my PC? Same as Chrome, not good.
My wife has a Mac iBook, front page looks correct on Chrome there.
More testing needed, folks.
To zoom out, use CTRL or COMMAND/- (minus). Same with + zooms in.
Aw shucks, you can delete that comment too. I have my Chrome and Edge enlarged (to get bigger type), when I went back to normal screen the sidebar came up appropriately and the top menu works. I don’t think there’s much you can do in programming to get around that problem. Apologies.
Whenever there’s a redesign of anything, website, magazine, whatever, howls from people used to the old design. Eventually they’ll get used to it.
I haven’t read all the comments, want a fresh look, apologies if I’m repeating. So, just beta testing, checking links at bottom:
“Technical details,” “printing” etc. all lead to the “About” page top, which could be confusing, anchors would be nice. Ditto for items listed under “Data Source”.
“RC Wiki” ?? If it’s a Wiki I expect to be able to be able to work in it. How about putting “privacy policy” under “About” and just label this “Links”?
“Start Here” is deeply buried, I almost missed it. I strongly recommend making this more prominent. At least put the sentence in a big bold font. Better still, make “start here” a separate item above “science links” under the suggested “Links” head, since a somewhat science-hesitant newbie might not want to go to a “science” link. Maybe even in the top menu bar? (This would be a good thing for testing over time, see how much traffic it gets.)
“Contact page” not functioning yet I guess, I don’t see a form in Chrome or Firefox.
Overall impression not bad. Too much whitespace. Top header with logo shouldn’t be that high.
The suggestion has been made to use comment link (time/date stamp) to refer back to a specific comment. I hope the Reply function will be used when appropriate. It would be nice to have a way to reduce material one would prefer to skip. (Tamino’s “killfile” = where can I learn how to use that?)
I assume the blog owners will correct the comment links that go to the article or top of comments rather than the specific comment.
Search on commenters name, etc. will find specific items.
Can’t please all of the people all of the time; lots of us don’t like change until we become accustomed to it.
Can’t please all of the people all of the time; lots of us don’t like change until we become accustomed to it.
Cogent.
Personally, I’m so thrilled with the threading, I don’t care about anything else! But, this site is, iirc, 16 years old? That’s a lot of built-up habit.
So, perhaps all of us should think about what our discourse will look like in light of the new format, I imagine a post followed by a solid wall of flame, going on for a couple hundred or so column inches, with multiple participants calling each other out and accusing each other of lying. It will be worse than off-putting. It will be boring, and boring kills blogs faster than anything.
To that end, I leave you with (maybe) the words of Eleanor Roosevelt:
Great minds discuss ideas;
average minds discuss events;
small minds discuss people.–Eleanor Roosevelt (attributed but disputed)
That said, I probably won’t be able to resist the occasional pithy insult for JDS, Mr. KIA or Weaktor. I’m only human.
Hi Ray,
a post followed by a solid wall of flame
participants calling each other out
accusing each other of lying
It will be boring, and boring kills blogs faster than anything.
If you took off those rose coloured glasses you might have realised long ago that RC has been exactly like that (incl. dead) for years. The core dynamic, in fact.
Today it is a broken record of survivors who refuse to let it go. The very people who are incapable of adopting that more enlightened mature behavior you quoted. A nice theory.
It could be renamed Real Snark. As Susan says above “lots of us don’t like change”
She got that right. Surface appearances are a very minor issue. Of no import. Because nothing ever changes for the better here.
Thanks for that, though I was told “things” rather than “events’; didn’t know she was said to be the source:
Ideas > things > people. I like the discussion at Quote Investigator, which incorporates some of what I’ve thought about this over the years; From a 1901 Autobiography by Charles Stewart:
It looks considerably better!
But it has lost functionality regarding old articles, in that comment numbers didn’t survive the transition. In prior conversations, threading was maintained by referring to comment numbers. A proper threading system would help going forward, but this damages the utility of past conversations.
It would have been best to capture this in requirements gathering. I’m not sure how custom the codebase is or whether a patch is feasible, but I’d call this a significant loss of information. Please fix it if feasible.
Yet another worthy website bites the dust! The New York Review of Books did this last year, abaondoning a perfect website in favor of an “improved” one that squanders screen space and is more difficult to read and to navigate, with distracting, garish colors. After years of reading there, I haven’t gone back since. As with too many other websites, it’s as though the intent of the change were to treat a full-size computer screen as though it were a cell phone, for a cell-phone reader’s attention span.
Local public libraries in the Bay Area have done the same in recent years for their online catalogs. It’s maddening to have to scroll and scroll and scroll due to waste space and mindless graphics inserted pointlessly, separating lines of text. The font you were using before was easier to read as well (don’t recall now what it was, and why is it larger?).
Did RealClimate base their new design decision per the guidance of a professional webpage designer? I looks like it. If so, they wasted their money, and should have done it themselves (or better yet, left it alone!).
One of the few really good web sites I continue to relish is PubMed (the Federal Government website), indexing and providing access to a wide range of scientific research papers. It is wonderfully compact, with no wasted space, and wonderfully useful and easy to navigate.
In sum, I regret this change at Real Climate.
(In passing, one of Real Climate’s qualities that I’ve always appreciated is the decision early on to slow down the sequence of images of current books by climate scientists. An effective and simple solution: just to slow the frequency to 30-second intervals, so as not to distract the reader unduly. I’m aware of no other website that has taken this courteous and effective step.)
Collapse…
…the reply threads.
It would solve scrolling issues, because the replies would take up limited column inches. Some version of this:
Original Comment
___First Reply
_____[…]
_______Most Recent Reply
This would give enough information to decide if you are interested in following the discussion, however many replies there might be. Click on the […], and you see the entire sub-thread, and you can jump in if you like.
So you could have one page giving access to lots and lots of comments, and you can focus on what interests you. (I’m guessing such a capability is possible here because it exists on other sites.)
Oh, I hate web sites that hide most of the content, making me click endlessly to see yet another level of nested replies (and multiple clicks to see the nested replies from multiple comments – each requires its own click) and to “Load more” at the bottom.
I use a large (22″) hi-res desktop screen, and I want to be able to use that screen real estate to give me as much information as possible on a single page. My eyes and brain are capable of scanning the text to see who is talking and decide what to read, and I can go through 50 comments in a few seconds to be able to know that most of it is the usual trolls and not worth reading. One finger on “Page Down” is all it takes. A few keystrokes without moving my hand, or a couple of dozen “move the mouse, click; move the mouse, click; move the mouse, click”. I know which one I find is more efficient.
Bob, each to his own, as they say.
There have been several suggestions that would help, if they could be implemented, to make things more convenient. Right now there are some obvious glitches that need to be addressed, and once that is done perhaps further refinement can happen.
A huge factor is having enough on one screen that I can see the context. In this redesign, the amount of information on one screen is so limited that getting Big Picture context is very difficult.
Expanding, scrolling; expanding, scrolling; expanding, scrolling; expanding, scrolling; expanding, scrolling still only lets me see small parts of the context at any one time.
For context, who someone is responding to also affects whether I think they are worth reading. Some people here are worth reading when they are engaged in a serious discussion with other serious people, but not worth reading when they are engaging The Usual Suspects. (Others are worth reading when they are engaging the trolls because their take-downs are so pithy and entertaining.)
Hmmm… a couple of things that may or may not be glitches.
First, couldn’t find “start here”. Is that content still available? If so, it’s not very accessible.
Second, the link labelled “science links” did not obviously lead to, well, science links.
Most obvious bug on mobile devices is that the scroll bar doesn’t work – it’s visible but you can’t use it to scroll with, which makes scrolling incredibly slow.
Linking to new comments still isn’t working; that’s really crucial.
Can this site put numbers on the comments? Or at least say they are on the way.
[Response: The previous plugin that did this no longer works and has been discontinued. We are looking for a replacement. – gavin]
Hr.Gavin
Taqke that serious.
On stating proof or argumjents, we must give rational adress to what it builds on.
I learnt that from Prof. D. Føllesdal who graduated at Harward, and saw it further in Evklids elements on their / his recommendation.
Obey and aspire under the best of Harward in this respect, They referred to Abraham Lincfoln , a lawyer also, in order to sell this.
Side bar at the bottom means lots of scrolling. This is error prone on the iPad.
Not having access to the “Recent Comments” listing on a mobile device is another major problem. I appreciate the space issue on a mobile, but the list of recent comments could be displayed as a pop-up, and there could be “View recent comments” link at the top of the list of comments, and clicking it could display the list of recent comments as a pop-up. The pop-up would of course have a Close button but in addition, clicking on one of the recent comments in the pop-up could result in the pop-up being dismissed and the comment in question being made visible.
Similarly there could be a “Recent Posts” link at the top of the article itself, which could display a similar pop-up.
Dave
I also agree with those who’ve pointed out that grey text on a grey background provides insufficient contrast for good readability. At the very least the grey text should be in a darker tint and the grey background should be in a much lighter tint.
Science advances one sidebar funeral at a time.
The necessary evil of broad bandwidth link lists can be mitigated by removing those that lack live authors and posts in the present decade , and setting up a search engine to collate new and current blogs touching on climate
You might also ( second hint, Gavin) consider adding the blogs of authors who are both alive and past RealClimate contributors.
A cautionary list of contrarian blogs that deplatform climate scientists should be maintained, and
I don’t know if my comment is going to be published but a new study about AMOC has been published. Unfortunatly and despite its public importance, it is not in free access. Could it be possible that, in a near future, a thread about this article be publisehd? https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01097-4
I’ve noticed that when I post replies the page will then scroll rapidly right to the bottom. The page sometimes also does this at random.
The reply feature is useful, but the huge text, lots of white space and only a few comments visible at once is not helpful.
About nested threads and the internal Reply Function there.
It stops past the 3rd level down.
One can not Reply to a 4th Level Response.
While The Beta Test Angels Weep
I like the staggered reply display. Information could be a bit more condensed though. Line length could be a bit bigger, but not too much as readability suffers. Font is nice, but uses up a lot of horizontal space. A bit less empty space in the vertical direction would be good i m o.
Another observation that I used to see from time to time on the original site, and seems to have survived through the redesign (so far).
Today when I load the main page, the Recent Comments shows these as the first five:
Jim Galasyn on Unforced Variations: Aug 2021
John Garland on Unforced Variations: Aug 2021
CCHolley on Unforced Variations: Aug 2021
Barton Paul Levenson on Forced Responses: July 2021
zebra on Realclimate redesign
After I click on zebra’s link to Realclimate redesign, the Recent comments list loses the first three and shows me these as the first two:
Barton Paul Levenson on Forced Responses: July 2021
zebra on Realclimate redesign
From the first list, if I click on the link to Jim Galasyn’s comment, the Recent Comments list survives the change in pages. On the old web site, the same behaviour would often leave it impossible to find Jim’s comment at all – once you went to the page it was supposed to be on, you’d get an older version of the page, missing the last few comments. So at least the redesign is a partial fix!
Love it! Thank you for working on the website and never abandoning it, on top of your most important and time consuming work on climate science in an age of scientific ignorance…nitpicking and kibitzing.