We've made major updates to the browse pages today. Please let us know your thoughts and comments here. Also, please report any bugs so we can get them fixed right away.

I use Opera and the whole thing is all screwed up! There is a preview of what the browser should look like in the news page. However, mine does not look like this. I have a small thumbnail of the poster on the left and all of their pictures are in vertical profile on the left with a massive amount of empty space in-between.

update: It just got worse! the empty space b/w the profile pic and the thumbnails has increased! It is so bad I must scroll to the side to even see the thumbnails.

@makaid:

Can you try clearing the cache and reloading the page? If this still doesn't work, please show us a screenshot.

I use firefox and all this browse page looks horrible...
Here is what I can see:
http://wrc.planet.ee/screen.jpg

But before when page loaded like 3 minutes, then it looked OK.. but 3 minutes!!!

@blind:

Can you reload that page and try again? Mike and I just made a fix.

everything is OK now!

Thats good

We added some stuff that should automatically clear the cache for all of you.

Nice improvement to the browse pages!

It's a good idea to prevent caching, but I'd suggest to remove this after a reasonable transition time. It's a little tiring now to have all the images reloaded all the time while browsing.

I've noticed that on some sites (e.g. slashdot.org) firefox will scroll back to where I left a "browsing" page after hitting the back button... I don't know how to make a browser do that, but that would be a neat feature to add.

Regards,
Henning

@ron:

That's true, but the way we were doing it before, your last photo could have been the one displayed on the browse page because it was randomly selecting a single photo.

I guess it's a tradeoff. Sorry about the downside

@henning:

I'm not sure if that's something we can control. We'll look into it. Thanks for the suggestion.

Thanks guys, this is a great feature. You guys rock!

This is interesting!
It's a bit overwhelming at first, but it's interesting to see how they look different from blog sized photos! ;)

dear michaels,

this is the first feature i really, umm, honestly dislike on photoblog. i have several reasons for this:

- there are too many pictures in total on the page. my eyes and brain can't process that many pictures in an overview, so they all get to be a blur, none of them stands out anymore, none catches my interest.
- i think that each entry should be represented by one of its pictures. if there are more to be discovered in it, i will do so after i got interested in the entry by its representative picture. this encouraged people (including me) to choose pictures that were equally interesting, because they could randomly pop up as representative. i LIKED the random display of pics... when reloading, this meant you got another one for the same entry! it wasn't a bug... it was a feature!
- the loading time for all these mini pictures has increased noticeable even on my broadband access here - the time it takes to load these browse pages is getting longer and longer. you'd have to cut down the number of entries shown by page, which i also think would be a bad idea, since it just means ore navigation back and forth. - this might be due to your cache emptying function, but i believe it's also because of the amount of data you load.
- photoblog for me stood for simplicity, unity, sameness that made it possible to find individuality in the entries by focussing on the pictures, not the page design. now there is increasing fokus on the page and entry design, because the information i get from the browse entries is not photo related, it's entry design related (lots of pics/little pics). people who post single pics almost are completely crushed by those with huge picture collections in their entries, since all thumbnails are the same size. usually, when i post a single pic, i do it because it is a story in itself.
- if you want completeness in the browse page, then why are there only the pictures and nothing of the text except for the title?

i plead you to change this back to the simpler, more viewer friendly version before... or give at least the option to change the browse page in my options.

sincerely a fan in any other matters of your gorgeous website,
michael AKA eidea

i'm 50/50 on this feature...

maybe a compromise is possible, make the default the same layout but show only one "random" thumb, then have a link to "display all thumbs" - kind of like how you do the blowse selections - would give people the choice and follow Photoblog design style

second point is, can title and user name go under the profile picture thumb - makes finding out who posted a little easier.

cheers and thanks for keeping the site development cranking
k

It takes forever to load (and I have stunning connection) and although the idea is good I believe the damage (the whole website seems slower over the past week or so) is bigger than the benefits.
I liked it better before..

Thanks for the feedback.

We're currently working on a different area of Photoblog, but once we're done with what we're doing we'll give you the option of choosing your browse format.

Please bear with us until we do it.

Looks pretty good on Firefox. My only suggestion would be to maybe do the titles old style - black print. Possibly to the left of the pics.

Profile picture -- Title -- pics.

@StevenF:

Sometimes the titles can get pretty long.

That would potentially make the page, and the dimensions of photos, very non-uniform. For example, if a member uploaded a very tall portrait photo, unless we let that photo dominate the browse page, it would have to be very, very narrow and small.

I agree with eidea.
I liked it better before. simplicity. Less is more.
Simplicity makes the site work.
However, I can live with it.

I guess it's ok that people can change their background color, but I have not seen a single blog where that was an improvement. Still, at least it is their choice.

If anything, here, what I would prefer would be that you could decide which picture was your browse thumbnail, or that it be the same as before.