As a preface, I want to make clear that I am, for the most part, a fan of the redesigned site. This post is not meant as a criticism of the tremendous amount of work that has gone into this update, but as a way to explore the criticisms and suggestions offered by the community in response to the redesign (with a few of my own ideas thrown in as well).
Though my day job involves primarily middle-tier application development, I’ve had occasion to do a little front-end web development. After reading many of the blog posts in the last couple days detailing the issues people were having with the DK5, I thought it would be interesting to implement some of the suggestions being proposed. There are browser plugins that allow one to override the style sheets for any website with locally specified styles. I used one such plugin (Stylish), available for Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari, to create a small set of style overrides that address some of the issues I saw discussed. My style sheet overrides can be found here.
To use these styles (these instructions are for Chrome but should be similar for other browsers):
- Install the Stylish extension for Chrome
- Navigate to dailykos.com
- Click the Stylish icon (White “S” to the right of the URL bar)
- Click on “Write style for: www.dailykos.com”
- Paste the content of my style sheet into the large text area.
- Provide a name for the style sheet in the top left field
- Click the Save button
Here are the changes included in this initial version of the style sheet:
- Imported the semi-bold weight of the Open Sans font
- Added a vertical line to the left of comments to make the nesting level of the comments a bit more evident
- Made comment text slightly darker and larger
- Unbolded the parent comment author’s name
- Made the comment author’s name semi-bold
- Added space between the action buttons (Recommend, Flag) to make them easier to use with touch screens
- Increased the font size and decreased the font weight of the blog post titles in the right sidebar on the main page
Please let me know if you find these changes useful, or if you have any suggestions for further changes.
Update:
- Inserted arrow between author’s name and the parent comment author’s name