Corporate Statement from Awl Publisher David Cho on the Redesign

So, we redesigned the site! That happened! Do note that the changes were not merely cosmetic. We’ve also tried to make the site work better for you. It’s a work in progress-we have a pretty thorough list of things that we still want to improve-but here’s what we’ve done so far.

Improved The Way You Manage Your Profile
See that link up there on the right that says “Login”? (If you’re already logged in, it will say “Settings”) Well, if you click that you can add the information that goes on your profile page, change your avatar (LOL, ABADAH) and login/password info. No more Gravatar! (You probably don’t know what that is because most of you-understandably-could never figure out how to change your user icons on it! See, for example, Balk, and he works here.)

Aggregated Comments
Hey, want to see what other funny/not-funny comments another user has made? Click the commenter name and you’ll go to a page with all of their bons mots. Now your baseless judgments of other commenters will be a little baseless, because you can see their whole body of work! But probably you will mostly use it to reread your own. Hey, that’s cool! We don’t judge.

Organized Contributor Information
Although the link to this page is on our list of things to fix, we now have a contributors page where you can sort through all of the people who are writing for the site and also go to their individual contributor page that lists all of their posts.

Enhanced General Navigation Elements
We’re trying to make it easier for you to find the information that you want. Expect to see more of an emphasis on content organization, mostly by topic or author, thus helping you get from point A (where you are now) to point B (surrounded by things that you enjoy reading) with a minimum of fuss.

Added Twitter/Facebook Connect
Now you can login by way of other accounts you have on existing internet websites. That’s pretty much that. Do note that those will, obviously, leave comments under your real name (or whatever fake name you use on those sites).

So while that’s what we’ve done thus far, there’s still plenty we’re working on to make the site better-not to mention fixing the inevitable bugs that have come up since we launched the new site. In an effort to be completely transparent-we are all about transparency!-here’s what’s on our list of short-term goals and fixes:

• Make our RSS feed look normal again
• Resolve general paragraph and linespace formatting issues
• Improve the speed and loading issues of the site, which are making EVERYONE angry
• Work on the slugs-those green-arrowy things that help categorize posts by broad topic-and the way they function
• Enhance the ease of navigation between posts
• Fix the weather thingy (up top, on the right! See it?) so that it actually works

And those are just the issues that we’re aware of. You may be having a problem that we don’t even know about! Feel free to share, either in the comments here or our inbox. We’d love to hear from you.