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The new Digg

digg.com

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Re: The new Digg

#61

Post by blauwbilgorgel »

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.

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 hesitate telling us.

  Google Webmaster Guidelines (Design & Content)
  Check for broken links and correct HTML.
So perhaps it is the "shit nobody, but front-end engineers, should care about" category.

Re: The new Digg

#63

Post by devgutt »

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..…

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

Re: The new Digg

#65

Post by mootothemax »

I'll be honest, I'm surprised by how much I like it. For a quick "give me something - anything! - to read over lunch" it serves the purpose for me very well.

Best of luck to the new team!

Re: The new Digg

#66

Post by rickmb »

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.

It falls into the "shit that will bite you in the ass one day" category. It's about engineering quality, and it goes all the way down to the stuff we don't see.

Given Digg's history, it's a bit of a red flag. However, it all depends on how this technical debt is managed. If this is an alpha release under the heading "release early, release often" and the tech debt is known, there's nothing alarming about it. But if this is truly considered a final product than it makes you question how capable these people are to revive Digg.

Either way, some of these issues suggest simply a lack of skill/knowledge rather than deliberate tech debt. That's not a good sign.

Re: The new Digg

#67

Post by iand »

blauwbilgorgel wrote: post #61
verroq wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Re: The new Digg

#68

Post by freehunter »

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…

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.

Re: The new Digg

#70

Post by veyron »

Facebook requirement is a nonstarter. Even if it cuts down spam, requiring FB already eliminates a good portion of the population.
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