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New Red Ferret Design – heralds the dawn of an historic new era for polecats everywhere

Newferret

Ta-Da.

So we bit the bullet, took the plunge, jumped the tortoise and launched a brand new Red Ferret design last night. We hope you like it. Some of the greatest personalities of the 20th century helped pull it together, including Sir Ranulph Fiennes (thanks for the wooly mittens, Ran!), Sir Paul McCartney for the colour scheme, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa for the loud exclamations at important moments and last but not least, Mrs Miggins next door for the lovely meat pies.

Newferretwiki

I’m intending to fire up the Intense Debate comment plugin from Automattic sometime today, because I really like the cross-platform conversation features like Twitter integration, threading and reputation and such. The only rule is you folks are going to have to use the comments section a lot or we’ll sulk and kick the table leg in an annoyingly repetitive way. 

Please holler if you have any comments, suggestions, issues or praise to throw our way and we’ll attempt to deal with them in a mature and adult manner.

One thing I’m going to try to do in line with the new design is encourage more writers to contribute. Dan has been an excellent indication of just how valuable it can be to have more than one voice on the blog, so I want to encourage that. It’s not going to be open to all, only those who have a Ferret mindset (and probably only one or two extra souls at most), so if you think you qualify and would like to become a contributor drop me a line.

Oh and finally, we’ve decided to drop the Journal from the official name, so from now on we’re going to be simply the Red Ferret. Which is how people know us anyway, really, truthfully. 

Thanks to everyone (seriously) who helped out, and to you our very cool readers.

 

20 Comments

  • Looks good. Although I can state that I am not a fan of the side by side mini posts at the bottom.

    • I've been trying to like the mini posts at the bottom, but it's just not working for me. I find the way the posts go from "fairly detailed" to "next to no info" just bugs me.

      (Also, the comment system erroneously reports that e-mail addresses containing a plus-sign are invalid.)

  • Since the upgrade RSS documents no longer show pictures, this is a real drawback, a picture says a thousand words…..

  • Since the upgrade RSS documents no longer show pictures, this is a real drawback, a picture says a thousand words…..

  • Looks great!

  • I think it looks good as well. But now there is a flashing ad that is top right so its 3 steps forward and 1 step back.

  • nice refresh dude.. :)

  • Thanks folks, hopefully flashing ads will disappear with time. :-) Mmm..I also tried the email your comment feature of Intense debate and it didn't exactly work, which is a shame.

  • Yay!!

    Btw, I thought Mrs Lovett did the pies?

  • I visit for your wit. Who cares about the design though it is gorgeous.

  • Let me preface my comment by saying that I love the new design! If you don't change a thing, I will be very content.

    However, in the header image, is the typewriter distracting to anybody but myself? Don't mistake my comment, I love the typewriter and it's placement. The "real" picture meshed in with the rest of the image doesn't look right to me and I feel it is somewhat distracting. Perhaps if you change the typewriter part of the image to fit better with the overall characteristic of the rest of the image? Although, I realize that changing something after releasing it may be somewhat painful, especially with all of the thought you obviously gave to the look of the new web site.

    Maybe I am just being too nit-picky?

    Also, I use the Google Reader and the feed does not display images now. Was this done intentionally? Or is it just a result of the new web site not being fine tuned yet?

    All in all, a job well done!

  • Aah…no sorry Dan.. it's definitely Miggins (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Miggins).:-) @Richard – sorry about that, trying to speed up page loads and all that.

  • We're hoping to return images to the feeds soon. Sorry for the interuption in service. :-)

  • Great new look on the site, but there are no longer any images in the feed in my google reader. Don't know if that was intentional or not, but i sure do like my pics in my feeds! :P

  • Love the new design! Beats every other blog I can think of.

  • Looks very nice. I reckon this is by far the wittiest gadget blog around.

  • @Forciare – thanks for the kind words and of course you're not being picky. :-) I kinda like the typewriter though, it speaks to the Hemmingway in me (that's Fred Hemmingway, our local fishmonger). Re the feeds, yep, that's still a work in progress, we hope to have that all up and running again shortly. Thanks again.

  • I was tracking comments I made on a previous entry and they're all gone. Will comments made under the older commenting system be restored?

    Also, the previous email input field allowed the option of tracking replies or not (via checkbox). I prefer not to track and just check back from time to time. This new one doesn't seem to allow for that option.

    Other than these two points, the new theme looks great and the header is fantastic!

  • Hi,
    Nice design, but I seem to have a bug that I havn't seen commented on yet, I am using Internet expolorer 7, when I click on an item to view it in detail and scroll down the page, the text from the item dissapears at some point, and I have to scroll back up to be able to view it.

  • Thanks for the report Neil, I've not experienced that at all. I'll try and get it checked. I don't suppose you have a screen grab you can send me? Cheers.

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