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The new Digg

digg.com

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Re: The new Digg

#81

Post by dangoldin »

lloeki wrote: post #59
blauwbilgorgel wrote: post #42

From a technical point of view this "redesign" scares me a bit: All the old stories and user accounts 404 now. That is a major loss to their SEO. 14 million pages just thrown away and not passing any juice. They don't employ canonical or robots.txt. They have character encoding issues. ("'Superbird' Discovered") They use a meta keywords tag, and it contains "celebrity news", which doesn't appear anywhere on their sit…

When I landed on the page I though "Nice, they made a responsive layout, like bostonglobe.com." So I resized the window, and... not. It just happened that my window was originally sized to their fixed width.

For a great example of a responsive news site take a look at http://www.breakingnews.com/

I was pretty impressed.

Re: The new Digg

#82

Post by nateabele »

blauwbilgorgel wrote: post #42

From a technical point of view this "redesign" scares me a bit: All the old stories and user accounts 404 now. That is a major loss to their SEO. 14 million pages just thrown away and not passing any juice. They don't employ canonical or robots.txt. They have character encoding issues. ("'Superbird' Discovered") They use a meta keywords tag, and it contains "celebrity news", which doesn't appear anywhere on their sit…

Oh, sorry. You must have missed the part where they rebuilt the entire thing in 6 weeks.

Re: The new Digg

#83

Post by posabsolute »

posabsolute wrote: post #55
blauwbilgorgel wrote: post #42

From a technical point of view this "redesign" scares me a bit: All the old stories and user accounts 404 now. That is a major loss to their SEO. 14 million pages just thrown away and not passing any juice. They don't employ canonical or robots.txt. They have character encoding issues. ("'Superbird' Discovered") They use a meta keywords tag, and it contains "celebrity news", which doesn't appear anywhere on their sit…

Add to that the old rss feeds are broken, so all those rss readers apps have stop working with digg. I also really don't understand what was the decision behind breaking all older stories, it seems ludicrous they do not take advantage of that. Even worse you now have to login with facebook! they did not bring back the old accounts, this seems like a very frustrating issue. Unless they want a completely new userbase..…

Small trivia, on mountain lion if you "drag scroll (like on iphone)" the scrollbar at the top you see an N logo

Re: The new Digg

#84

Post by johnbellone »

verroq wrote: post #56
blauwbilgorgel wrote: post #42

From a technical point of view this "redesign" scares me a bit: All the old stories and user accounts 404 now. That is a major loss to their SEO. 14 million pages just thrown away and not passing any juice. They don't employ canonical or robots.txt. They have character encoding issues. ("'Superbird' Discovered") They use a meta keywords tag, and it contains "celebrity news", which doesn't appear anywhere on their sit…

Apart from all the old pages being 404 (which is a huge mishap). Nitpicking on html is a fun and amusing pastime, but unless the page is deformed in some way, it falls into the "shit nobody cares about" category.

Was the data included in the purchase of the sale?

I am looking at the login page and it seems to require Facebook authentication, and not even an option to use my old Digg.com account. In the FAQ it implies that eventually the old data will return.

I'm starting to feel like they decided to release a work-in-progress to capitalize on the wave of press they've received due to the sale. Most people had high hopes for the new management, and releasing early with a product that is less than half finished really causes a smell.

Re: The new Digg

#85

Post by daleharvey »

orangethirty wrote: post #76
freehunter wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The layout breaks without javascript on I see this bandied about on reviews of various sites, and I continue to believe it doesn't matter. If you have Javascript turned off and a page doesn't load, you should know why that page isn't loading. It's because you deliberately broke it for yourself.

I disagree. They broke it by not providing a fallback option. You always provide a fallback option, even if it is a simpler website.

You dont always do anything, you compare the cost of the effort against the value added, if its not worth doing, then people wont do it

Re: The new Digg

#86

Post by johnbellone »

iand wrote: post #67
blauwbilgorgel wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To get a website up and running, most of what I listed falls indeed in the 20% category (80/20). But if you care about accessibility, usability and SEO you should probably care about HTML issues like pagespeed and validation. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 Create documents that validate to published formal grammars. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/response-times.html Users still hate slow sites and don't hesi…

Let's be fair: this is a 6 week old project to reconstruct Digg from scratch. In another 6 weeks most of these HTML problems will be gone. Also, I'm pretty sure they will figure out how to rescue those 14M 404s

That's not the point. Why rush the release when you know that historically Digg had problems with losing people because they severely botched a redesign?

Didn't Digg at one point purge their comments and there was a huge uproar? The new management shouldn't have went online without the migrated data, or at the very least, the user profiles.

Re: The new Digg

#87

Post by posabsolute »

devgutt wrote: post #63
posabsolute wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add to that the old rss feeds are broken, so all those rss readers apps have stop working with digg. I also really don't understand what was the decision behind breaking all older stories, it seems ludicrous they do not take advantage of that. Even worse you now have to login with facebook! they did not bring back the old accounts, this seems like a very frustrating issue. Unless they want a completely new userbase..…

What about my data from the old Digg? We believe that users own their data. We’re working on a system that will extract all user data from the old Digg infrastructure. In August we’re launching an archive website for users of the old Digg to find, browse, and share a history of their submissions, diggs, and comments. from http://www.digg.com/faq

Thing is, is it worth it to relaunch without user accounts and without a proper login solution?

It seems to me you are really looking at not having those users that was on the site for a long time, it's not like digg and facebook really goes hand to hand together...

Re: The new Digg

#88

Post by johnbellone »

AlexanderZ wrote: post #73

The team had to make drastic changes. They wanted people to forget about the old Digg and its fiasco. The best way to do it? Become completely different. They also needed to become different from their rivals. That's why I don't understand why people here are complaining on the new format. I personally find it great and novel. The clean design and only six stories in sight allow you to focus and actually pay more att…

No they absolutely didn't. All the team needed to do is put a fresh coat of paint on Digg, similar to it was in the beginning, and capitalize on the traffic before they wanted to make drastic changes.

Digg's whole problem started with when they tried to become the Twitter of news. That's not original intent of the site. If you purchased all that data, all that SEO linking, you'd have to be absolutely crazy not to migrate over at least the stories into your new design.

These guys completely dropped the ball.

Re: The new Digg

#89

Post by orangethirty »

It looks like a plain version of yahoo. What is their goal here?

If I were digg, I'd just hire a bunch of engineers, and let them put out a new product under the old name. Something not directly related to their past. Though I would keep their archives online for SEO.

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