Personally, I think the old design was holding FDL back, keeping it from growing even faster than it was. People coming from Daily Kos had to content themselves with great writing, and just endure the confusing site design and godawful haloscan comments. I know a few who gave up.

As fast as FDL has been growing, I’m positive it will grow even faster with a more robust design — which this is.

:evil:

The backgrounds, margins, and various other settings can be easily changed by the user. Comment preview and things like that are plugins that FDL will need to add in (as with any Wordpress template).

gee, i remember a time when i got an email from someone named jane asking why some new blog called “firedoglake” was no longer linked to on skippy.

how soon they forget.

* The ‘Read the rest of this entry’ links are clunky and slow. Compare with “expand/collapse post” links at Think Progress.

* The background is straight out of M$ Frontpage – as used by every kewl 14 year-old.

* The indents on quoted material are unnecessary and unattractive. And you haven’t got room for them: for example, the fixed space occupied by the outer columns means that the user’s browser window must now be more than 900 pixels wide in order to accommodate the graphic in “How Much Do Senate Democrats Like the President?”; otherwise the graphic is truncated. (Pity those who use 800×600 resolution.)

Oh, and as others have commented, you *really* need a preview button (God knows how the above thinkprogress.org link will appear).

Got here late in the day, and am not computer-savvy enough to understand lots of the lingo being used to describe different hosting scenarios.

But I know how to be patient! And maybe I’ll pick up some knowledge along the way.