This Space for Rent

Oh g-d my eyes!

A weblog I used to read religiously until about 12 hours ago – Comics Curmudgeon – went on holiday and came back with a brand new post-Decaster page design.

Which sucks.

It sucks with the malignant light of a thousand imploding suns.

I looked at it the first time, went “eeeuuuww!”, and adblocked the more offensive images out of my sight.

A few hours later, I looked at it again, said “Oh, I can’t stand this!” and checked to see if the rss feed would be better. Nope; the RSS feed is one of those excerpt feeds where you have to go to the regular page to read anything). So I went on a search for readability to see if a format sanitizer would make things any better. It didn’t (readability stripped out things like post titles, and mangled the formatting to the point where all of the interesting images fell down to the end of the now single long (and slightly more incoherent that usual) mashup post.

And then I tried to look at it again. And my fingers immediately ran screaming to the bookmarks file where they deleted the offending bookmarks and, possibly, saved the remaining fragments of my sanity.

And I thought the scienceblogs layout was tacky and horrible. I mean it is tacky and horrible (but all script-delivered, and NoScript fixes that wagon) but compared to the New! Shiny! Comics Curmudgeon it’s like a Palladian villa.

Comments


Is the site legible if you turn CSS off?

rone Sun Jan 3 15:39:45 2010

I wanted to see this blight on the Internet landscape, so I searched for and found the sight. At first, I thought I was not at the correct url. Then I found the little “news” post that talked about the redesign.

Then I thought, “Maybe I have to allow javascript before the sight horrifies me.” Apparently not. I don’t know what it looked like before. Now it seems to be a boring, plain list. I rather like boring, plain lists.

Am I missing something?

Lynn Dobbs Mon Jan 4 11:00:12 2010

The new Comics Curmudgeon design has

  • a big old header block with ads,
  • a “comment of the week” that’s prominently placed in the header,
  • an appalling colo(u)r scheme, which carries over into the actual content.
  • the little menu bar across the top of the page.

I hates them all.

But fortunately rone’s idea of blocking the css makes the site plain vanilla and readable. I need to put a proxy server onto pell that I can use to decss web pages so I can filter offending sites through them, but once I’ve done that (I’m using adblock now, which means that I can’t read comics curmudgeon anywhere else) I’ll have better luck with being able to put it back into the bookmarks and be able to read it everywhere without being offending by the multiple crimes against style that it is right now.

David Parsons Tue Jan 5 22:08:33 2010

Comments are closed