A New Day, A New Dot

2009
27
Jan

Hello everyone! I would like to welcome you to the new and improved KDE Dot News. As I am sure many of you know, although the old KDE Dot News has served the KDE community very well, it was beginning to show its age. Because of that a number of people including myself took it upon ourselves to modernise the Dot.

The new Dot also has a number of exciting new features including:

A comment moderation system similar to Slashdot
The ability to translate stories (and interface elements) into multiple languages
It streamlines story submission and the editing process
A sexy new look

As part of this, it is now going to be required to get an account to comment. While we were somewhat hesitant to do this we feel that having an account will help encourage a greater dialogue among users on the Dot. Since signing up to get an account can be a pain, you can already login if you have an OpenID. If not I encourage you to sign up for an account now.

Importantly, the new Dot is being based on the open source content management system Drupal. This will make continued maintenance of the Dot easier and will also allow us to roll out cool features at a faster pace. Additionally, every story and comment that has ever been written on the Dot has been imported into Drupal.

I would like to thank Philip Tyrer and Nuno Pinheiro for the awesome new design for the Dot. I would also like Daniel Molkentin for helping export the stories from the old Dot and Dirk Mueller for taking the time to troubleshoot server issues. Many thanks go to OSUOUL who hosted our server very reliably for many years. Lastly, thanks to everyone in the KDE community for their support throughout the entire design and implementation process.

We hope everyone enjoys the Dot as much as we enjoyed remaking it.

- Kyle Cunningham

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Comments

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 6:18am — JackieBrown

Score: 4

Looks great!

Nice new look

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 9:06am — Autumnautist

Score: 2

Simply beautiful!

Simply beautiful!Contrats to the web dev/designers!

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 7:17am — thomas

Score: 3

congrats!

well done...! The new look is great! I really liked the simplicity of the old dot layout though it was really starting to show its age. You've done a fantastic job by not "overdoing" it. The new layout is good looking while not to fancy and still simplistic.

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 9:00am — augustofretes

Score: 1

Looks great

And the new features are a given too :-)

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 10:08am — FrankKarlitschek

Score: 1

Great Layout

Congratulations to the team

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 10:18am — einar

Score: 2

At last, it's there!

Thanks to Kyle and to everyone who made this happen.

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 11:21am — Daniel

Score: 1

Thumbs Up!

Great Design... the redesign was really badly needed. Very well done. Daniel

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 11:44am — Robin

Score: 2

OH MY GOD!

What happened here? Time Warp from 2000 to 2009? ;) Look really great, guys! :)

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 11:51am — jolos

Score: 8

A huge improvement

This is certainly a big ( and needed ) improvement. Though,I have two minor remarks: <ul> <li> I don't like the styling of the primary links </li> <li> the sidebar is quite wide, wich makes the article quite small. Certainly when images are used. Would you consider to not show them on the article page ( that's easy to do with drupal )? </li> </ul> But I repeat: these are minor remarks. Your work is outstanding!

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 11:59am — bcooksley

Score: 1

Good design

Really nice design, a breath of fresh air. Some comments however from Konqui on KDE 4 Trunk: Both the subject field in comments and email address field in register + edit account are too long and go behind the kde apps box. This post has no author or category. And the button to search is mushed up between search text box and the page design. Otherwise, an excellent perfect design. Thanks to all those who made this happen.

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 12:05pm — anoop.chargotra

Score: 1

Awesome

Good going. It looks great.

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 12:09pm — sonic

Score: 10

Looks very nice indeed. I

Looks very nice indeed. I just hope the account requirement doesn't deter people from posting (especially cricisms, since there is the danger of mobbing). Some minor rendering glitches I see on FF3/MacOS (plus a couple of things I think have still room for improvement) <ul> <li>the KDE.NEWS text at the top is quite blurry</li> <li>the rounded corner at the right bottom of the search bar seems to be missing two or three pixels</li> <li>the "more" links in the sidebar boxes could use some right padding</li> <li>the list bullets in the account sidebar are different and indented differently than the ones in the other boxes</li> <li>the KDE logo on the top right seems quite small. Also: Is it just me or is there some trapezoid distortion (top seems smaller than bottom)? Or is this some sort of 3d effect?</li> <li>the "By: " line for this article is empty</li> <li>the links are a bit too colorful for my taste: blue on :link, green on :hover and purple on :visited is a bit too much, maybe.</li> <li>the helptext says that lines and paragraphs break automatically, but this is not the case, at least not in the preview: All I see is one blob of text</li> </ul>

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 2:10pm — majewsky

Score: -1

One more rendering glitch

I have to add that, on a 4.2 RC1 Konqi, the Search button (which looks like it should just be a button with an arrow on it) also carries the caption "earc" (should most probably be "Search", but the space is not sufficient). Please fix.

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 12:11pm — tkoski

Score: 1

Nice work!

Looking good and seems to work well too. Thank you all who have used their time providing this :-)

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 12:17pm — radtoo

Score: 6

Well done, but...

Technically it seems awesome, like the OpenID support (even though at least gmail doesn't seem to authenticate). However, the layout is definitely not quite right for me. I'd prefer a layout that spans the full page, either multi-column newspaper-style (yep, looks ugly but is actually less tiresome to read) or just regular single column.

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 2:47pm — andresomers

Score: 1

Yeah, I totally agree with

Yeah, I totally agree with you. I tried to use my Google account to log in, but that did not work. The column with comments is too small now: I like to be able to *use* the space that my monitor offers. Furthermore, there is no way to get back from your account details to the dot itself and the planet KDE listing is way to short. It is also annoying that you are *forced* to preview your comment.

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 3:03pm — teatime

Score: 1

Agreed. OpenID support is

Agreed. OpenID support is cool. Good stuff. And I don't like the fixed width layout either. Please let me use my screen in the way I prefer! I can resize the window myself, thanks. Oh, and most recent at the bottom is what I expect too. Having most-recent-new-post above feels unintuitive, particularly since most-recent-post-in-a-thread is below.

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 6:07pm — suy

Score: 1

The layout

If the layout spans the full page, lines will be too long. Normally, for a proper legibility, lines with no more than 80-100 characters are a must. With the actual layout lines are about 90 characters, with is nice. There was a problem, however, with the old dot design that was very unpleasant: when somebody posted a long link, the width of the page was too big, and the uncomfortable horizontal scroll appeared. I hope that this doesn't happen anymore, either because "overflow: auto" is used in comment's block, or because basic HTML is allowed (Drupal will do the filtering, although it's a security concern).

Wed, 2009/01/28 - 3:03am — odalman

Score: -1

The layout

> If the layout spans the full page, lines will be too long. If the layout spans the full page, it will be configurable by the user (as long as he has a window manager installed). Now there is only a narrow column in the middle of the screen, occupying ¼ - 1/3 of the width. The rest is white. And that sentence of yours is all that fits on a line. It is only 59 characters, not 80 - 100 as you claim.

This new look is CRAP by Username

Score: -3

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 12:42pm — illogic-al

Score: -1

I believe

what you were trying to say is: Please sir, I want w i d e r. Me? I like it as is.

Self-adjusting by Username

Score: -4

Level by Username

Score: -4

Next level by Username

Score: -5

Next level by Username

Score: -5

Next level by Username

Score: -5

Next level by Username

Score: -5

Next level by Username

Score: -5

Next level by Username

Score: -4

Next level by Username

Score: -5

Final? by stoked

Score: -4

Well by Username

Score: -3

negative vote by tone /language by Autumnautist

Score: -4

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 1:41pm — pinda

Score: 2

Actually, the site adapts to

Actually, the site adapts to the view area of your browser, the main text column just stays the same size, which is actually a good thing imo: text with lines longer then about 100 characters become a pain to read. Ideally you don't have to move your eyes much from the left to right. That's the reason newspapers have such small column. Or the default LaTeX template has such big margins on the left and the right. Actually most books and magazines have lines shorter then 100 characters. This is also one of the main reasons why wide screen monitors on a computer are such a terrible idea. Unless you can rotate them 90 degrees of course. Oh, and thanks to everybody involved in this new look, fresh and slick, just the way I like it. :)

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 2:00pm — Username

Score: 2

Well

1. I agree with you about those 100 characters. Though I fail to see how it invalidates my idea in general. 2. Hmm, I do not think you realize what "age" you are living in: this is the age of notebooks. Now explain these to me: Would a notebook with a screen 10:16 (instead of 16:10) be sitting stable on your desk? Where do you put the keyboard on such a notebook? Or, just maybe, wide screen monitors on a computer might not be such a terrible idea at all. 3. Your sentence "site adapts to the view area of your browser, the main text column just stays the same size" seems self-contradictory to me.

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 4:59pm — zander

Score: 2

You can't change your browser window?

If you have problems with the readability of the text, what about resizing your browser window? Its not that hard. I'm quite annoyed that 75% of my screen is white and I see 5 words per line. And I can't do anything about it since the site decides for me which amount of pixels work for me :(

Y e a h , l i n e s 1 by DeiF

Score: -4

Wed, 2009/01/28 - 5:47pm — pedro.alves

Score: -1

Too narrow for replies

Each reply gets aligned right a bit more related to it's parent, so, after a few replies, you end up with comments with a word per line ... that is just bogus. Please, make use of all screen estate.

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 2:49pm — Ronald

Score: 1

RE: This new look is CRAP

I agree and promoted you up. I just loaded the site and the first thing on my mind was: why's the text all compacted in the middle? Less RSS feeds too. And the worst new "feature" is self-moderated news comments. IMO the older mostly text web site was superior for the readers.

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 12:24pm — pulp

Score: 0

congratulations

Very nice, thanks!

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 12:34pm — ianjo

Score: 1

Go dot!

A new dot for a new kde desktop, seems fitting :) I agree with some of the comments here that the layout could still use some tweaking, but great work so far, the dot is definitely better this way!

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 12:37pm — illogic-al

Score: 1

Go Go Gadget dot

Looks great. Good work. Kudos on the openid login working (after the second try) ;-)

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 1:08pm — TunaTom

Score: 1

Dude!

That's great. I was so afraid i could miss the release article (that will surely come on the dot ?) when you were down all morning long (in my TZ). Now you're not only back but looking better than ever (although I would appreciate if the text was a bit wider. I guess it's because of all the small devices that are all the rage? ) Anyway - double celebration today: for the dot and for 4.2 ! Congratulations, Dudes and Dudesses.

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 1:12pm — Jucato

Score: 14

Congratulations!

Congratulations on the new "release" of the Dot. These are much needed changes, IMHO, specially the moderation/rating system. There's one peculiar thing I'd like to request though. Could you please reverse the order of comments from oldest at the top to most recent at the bottom? The way it is now is quite... unusual.

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 1:35pm — SSJ_GZ

Score: 2

"Could you please reverse the

"Could you please reverse the order of comments from oldest at the top to most recent at the bottom? The way it is now is quite... unusual." +1 from me :) Also, is there a chance that the Flat Forty could make a return? The "x new comments" isn't quite the same as it is per-article and also you have to manually chase up the new comments as they are likely to be spread over the comments section. Apart from that, this all looks much more modern and pleasing :)

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 2:07pm — Username

Score: -2

Configurability

I like the order of comments from the most recent to the oldest. The way it is now is quite... good. Question: How to please users if they have opposing opinions? Answer: Make the look of this site be, to some extent, configurable on a per-user basis.

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 2:00pm — DeiF

Score: 2

Overall great, but some annoyances

The new look and functionality is great but I agree with some comments here: * The text is too narrow. I have had enough of "Optimized for X resolution" webs. Please make the layout expand to the browser width. * I like to see oldest comments first. * Login to post? You have to be kidding me. * "Lines and paragraphs break automatically". It's not working for me. I had to insert manually some " " tags.

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 2:38pm — danimo

Score: 0

Login to post? You have to be

Login to post? You have to be kidding me."

No.

"Lines and paragraphs break automatically". It's not working for me. I had to insert manually some " " tags.

Yes, that seems to be broken indeed.

Text-width and comment-ordering could be settings. Kyle?

Wed, 2009/01/28 - 3:11am — odalman

Score: 0

Text-width and comment-ordering

Yes, text-width should be easily configurable with the window manager. Comment ordering should be a setting in the user account.

Tue, 2009/01/27 - 2:17pm — Jakob Petsovits

Score: 3

Mail subscription

I wonder if the e-mail subscription functionality went away, or if I just can't find it, or if it's coming back anyways. Nevermind that, the new dot looks awesome, and should be pretty more or less future proof by running on Drupal. (Also, have you considered writing up a case study for the drupal.org front page? *That* might bring even more interest in the dot in particular and KDE in general :)