You’ve probably noticed: things are looking a little different around here.
We’ve given the site a new look, and worked to make things better, faster, and stronger, too. Here are a few of the improvements we’ve made:
- Streamlined homepage: news and blog in one place, with a new feature box.
- Faster speed.
- New commenting system: no jumping through spam-filter hoops to join the conversation.
Here’s what hasn’t changed:
- Daily news: each weekday morning we handpick the top ten must-read sustainability stories from around the Northwest–helping you stay informed in minutes a day.
- Blog: our looks have changed, but the Sightline research team continues to post commentary and analysis of regional trends (and jokes and rants here and there, too).
- Access: you can still choose to receive our work via the web, email, or RSS.
We’ve also redone our email newsletters. (Not a subscriber? Sign up here.)
We think it’s pretty cool. If you agree, we hope you’ll share the new site with your friends and colleagues. And let us know what you think in the comments below!
You’ve brought my RSS feed to its knees with multiple duplicates.
Also, I get a virtual server error whenever I attempt to go to the site.
My RSS feed keeps picking up duplicates of the blog articles.
Hi there, thanks for the comments about RSS. During the switch we had to switch the source of our RSS feeds. As a result, the last 10 or so stories were re-published twice. Going forward, things should be normal. Sorry for any inconvenience.
Eric,
Things are looking and working great today, thanks to the prompt attention!
I hope you (and your team) are relaxing with a delicious adult beverage of your choice by now.
Cheers, and the changes look great!
jmb
Nice work on the new site. It does load faster, and it’s nice not having to wrestle with the capcha in order to comment. One thing I DO miss is the one line article synopsis that used to accompany each article link. Many times an article’s title isn’t descriptive enough to let me decide if I want to read it or not. The previous format had a one or two sentence synopsis that gave me a peek into the article’s contents, and, more often than not, drew me in when the title did not.
And, of course, the PREVIOUS site format (i.e. the one used before last week’s even) had two or three related articles after each major article link. I often found them more interesting and useful than the primary article. But I suspect we are not going back there ever.
Anyway, I don’t mean to sound crabby. You all do a tremendous amount of work tremendously well. And I much appreciate your dedication and insights. It’s just that the site seems to keep getting optimized for the web, and not so much for the information. It’s easier to go THROUGH, but there’s less to go TO.
Paul
Hi Paul–
Thanks for your thoughts on the new site. We always appreciate feedback, especially from our regular readers.
I’m happy to report that you can still get the synopsis of each article, just not on the homepage. You can find the summaries in the daily email and on the news page.
As for “related links,” we made a tough decision some months ago to cut those. We were excited to introduce that feature way back when we launched the last version of the Sightline Daily site. But we found the system to grab automatically-generated links wasn’t as good as we’d like at finding related content and often pulled up bad matches, meaning we had to go back in and pick stories manually. When we looked at the number of people clicking on those links (only a few of our most inquisitive readers—like yourself), we decided to invest the time we were spending on those links elsewhere.
Ah! The News page. Perfect. That will become my new destination.
Thanks, Eric.
I’d say maybe DIFFERENT stuff to go through, not less. The blog and Sightline’s work is now emphasized on the site, and that’s probably as it should be. The news service is VERY valuable, but delving into the news in a more detailed way by Sightline staff is also VERY valuable, so I’ll probably be giving the blog more time now.
Like Paul, I’d like to thank the staff of Sightline for their awesome work. I’ve been a reader of the Sightline Daily site since the very beginning (when it was Tidepool), and it is still my favorite web site.
A couple suggestions: one, if you’re using a WordPress-like CMS, then it should be easy to sort on topic for the news stories automatically; and two, there should be an easy way to access archives of news stories. The topics of the news stories are included, so readers will expect that you can sort on this. And the news archives are by day, so that if you want to see news from a week ago, you have to go back one day at a time.
Thanks again for your hard work.
What happened to the news stories organized by topic? They were so useful to me — I ckecked them daily for stories aligned with my interests. Where’d they go?