Slate‘s layout has long been terrible, as in:
- crowded in appearance
- a constantly metastasizing number of specialty sections
- an “older” button which actually required more than one hit to get to the not-on-the-front-page entries (a problem exacerbated by a lousy search function
- non-obvious archive retrieval system (although, to be honest, I could be misremembering this)
So, finally, they’ve changed it. Yay!
Do I like it? Nay!
One the one hand, you should disregard my dislike, because I dislike any changes made to a design to which I’ve become accustomed. (You thought I was joking about my temperamental conservatism? I was not.) Disqus has changed its style a number of times and each time I’ve hated it.
And then I’ve gotten used to it. I expect to get used to the Slate re-design.
(Then again, I still dislike the re-design of the Atlantic blogs, and that’s been awhile. Still, my own history suggests I’ll come to terms with, and perhaps even like, the New! Improved! Slate layout.)
ON THE OTHER HAND, however, Slate has still not fixed the incredibly fucking annoyingly awful “read more” function which, unlike similar functions at The Daily Dish and The Slog, takes the reader away from the main or index page and to the single post, which in turn requires one go back to that index page before one can go on to the next story.
I know, I know: this is not a problem on the order of an asteroid strike or the extinction of the coffee bean, but given how incredibly fucking annoyingly awful the single-post “read more” function is, and how the solution—an unfolding “read more” function—is a thing which exists in the world, why couldn’t Slate have done the one goddamned thing that I and every other reader of their site would have instantly and unreservedly hailed?
Or is the retention of that incredibly fucking annoyingly awful single-post “read more” function simply a kind of #Slatepitch, wherein they choose to do the one thing that everyone agrees is terrible?
