• We appreciate the feedback we’ve heard form you all on the new design and site so far. First up, we want you all to know we’re glad that you like what you’re seeing, and also appreciate what we’re doing. The site that you’re looking at is, really, in our eyes, still very much a “beta” site. We didn’t want to miss our 10th birthday, and had the site at least in good working order, for the most part, so we decided to go ahead with the rollout, figuring more eyes on it would mean more testing, and more feedback. So, we thank you for all you’re doing so far.

  The first round of bugs we plan to tackle are visual ones. We can see that a lot of you (almost 50% of the site visitors) are using Internet Explorer 7 or 6. This will definitely result in some display issues, especially in IE6. Once we get the bug fixed, you’ll see all the pretty pictures much better. We also have some toolbar overlap with the top dropdown menus that’s only happening in IE, not Firefox or Safari. So, visually fixing up the site is our top task at the moment.

  For those of you with smaller screens or resolutions, we hear you. The right sidebar is a bit larger than necessary and we’re working to take that down a bit to assist you. The site looks awesome in widescreen settings and higher resolutions, and takes full advantage, it just doesn’t scale down as nice as we’d like. We’re working on it, and we’ll ensure that you have as pleasant an experience as the rest of us. We have already started removing the sidebar from pages such as a the Drinking Games splash screen, where the large image was causing issues for smaller screens.

  Header graphics will return, either the one you know and love or a brand new design. We’re doing all the design off-site right now, so our changes don’t interfere with the site you’re viewing. When we get it looking pretty, we’ll roll out design fixes, as available. The site’s look will evolve over the next few weeks and months, all for the better.

  Iphone users: We hear the site looked pretty good on the phone’s safari browser, though with all the extra header and sidebar fluff, we worried it was a bit much. So, for now, you’ll get a special version of the page automatically when you connect via your iphone, that will just give you a plain version of the news. We’re hoping to soon add in an option that will allow you to switch between the bare bones version and back to the full colorful version, if you choose.

  Our live archive is something we love and will continue to improve over the next few weeks. It involves going back to every story and categorizing it to allow more specific searching through old posts. Soon, we’ll have an advanced search that will give you category based control, as well. But not until we have everything in its place. Categories are brand new for News Askew this time around, so it involves a lot of time and effort in reading each old post, and deciding where to put it. Even creating new categories as we see fit. The live archive is up and running but is beta software using javascript. It may not work for you. If not, please try a more recent browser and ensure your javascript is running.

  We sincerely hope you are enjoying the new News Askew, and that you’ll stick with us as the new site continues to evolve into its new form. Thanks as always for your patience and support.

• Just to let you fine folks who employ our handy RSS syndication feed, when the new site went live, the feed address CHANGED. We temporarily still have the old RSS file up to allow folks and sites time to switch over, however, that will soon go bye-bye. So, if you have any subscriptions, please update them. Also, if you make use of any RSS syndication sites out there (Feedburner and the like), please drop them a line and let them know that our address has changed. We assume this eventually happens automagically, but if there’s a quicker way to help that along, cool. We notice a ton of RSS traffic in our new hitlogs, so we know a lot of folks have been using it. Most modern browsers will pick this up on their own, however, outside websites and external RSS applications won’t, so please update your devices and software.

So, note the NEW address, http://www.newsaskew.com/feed. And tell your pals. Thanks for shopping with us at the new News Askew today. We’ll have a news update for ya later — Just been spending the day categorizing for our new Live Archive. Have you checked them out yet?