It is with great excitement and pleasure that I present to you the new version of 3 Quarks Daily. You will have already noticed our bold new look, I am sure. Here is a summary of some of the new features:
- Site width has been explanded to 1024 pixels and a column added on the left side to make the look more symmetrical and reduce clutter in the right-hand column.
- A randomly chosen main banner is displayed from a list of interesting images contributed by various artist and photographer friends of 3QD. If you don't like the banner image, just refresh the page by clicking the main banner and you'll get a different one. Try it now, it's kind of addictive!
- There is a new menu bar and new pages which are under construction at the moment. We are in the process of organizing the information for the prizes and symposia in a better way. We will also be updating the Monday Magazine page with a better design a little bit later.
- The “Search” function in the menu bar finally works properly!
- At the bottom of each post are new social media buttons to allow you to share that post on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and other sites, or just to email it to a friend.
- The biggest change of all is that we have switched to a very powerful comments platform called Disqus and have imported all existing 75,000+ comments into this new system. This will allow you to do many useful things, such as:
- Threaded comments: one can comment not just on the post, but on other comments as well.
- Subscribe via email: you can do this to be notified of new comments on a given comment thread.
- Edit or delete your own comments after publishing them.
- Vote comments up or down.
- Share comments via social media.
- Include pictures in comments.
- And much more.
- The HTML code for the entire site has been cleaned up and updated and we hope you'll notice that the site loads significantly more quickly than before.
We had to overcome a number of hurdles and so it has taken us a while to roll out this new version but I hope you'll agree that it has been worth the wait. We have tried to maintain a degree of continuity with our old design while adding new features and giving the site a more contemporary look.
The overall layout and banner logo have been designed by me, and I have tried to keep it as simple and clean as possible. Banner images have been contributed by Terri Amig, Carla Goller, Tom Hilde, Georg Hofer, Sheherbano Husain, Margit Oberrauch, Sughra Raza, Hartwig Thaler, and me. I would especially like to thank Henry Molofsky who worked energetically with me on various aspects of the design. And last, but not by any means least, the new features have been expertly coded by Dumky de Wilde, to whom goes much credit and many thanks.
As you can imagine, there will inevitably be some bugs and it will take a little time before everything starts humming along smoothly, so please be patient as we try to fix any problems and do bring anything wrong that you notice to our attention. Please keep in mind that it always takes a few days to get used to a new look!
I really, really, hope you like the changes but even if you don't we would love to know what you think. Please do give us some feedback in the comments section of this post, including on the new comments system itself.
Yours,
Abbas
P.S. This post will stay on top for a few days as explanation of the new stuff for returning readers. New posts are just below this one.