Dear Salon reader --
Alright already! We heard you -- and we did something about it.
With today's issue, faithful (if sometimes ill-tempered) Salon readers will note that some of the features of our recent redesign have been unceremoniously jettisoned.
Gone is the "horizontal sprawl," as one unkind reader put it, of coverlines on our home page, to be replaced by our old vertical scroll of story listings. Also brought back from the undead is our old habit of linking cover stories directly to the articles themselves. Yes, you will no longer be forced to take a detour to our various department home pages to find your desired story -- though we hope to entice you to those pages nonetheless, as we continue rolling out new features and services on them.
After finally exterminating the bugs that had knocked our wire stories off the air, Salon's home pages once more feature a carefully selected roundup of breaking news stories from AP. And all of you who were upset to find that you could no longer change our type font sizes can relax: We'd tried to use some complex Web technologies to adapt Salon's text seamlessly and automatically to each combination of browser and platform; but what worked in our tests did not work very well on our live site, so we're junking it and handing the font controls back to you.
Salon's redesign project was not simply a perverse experiment, though it seemed that way to many of you. We needed to find a way of showcasing our growing volume of articles, editorial departments and reader services in a new and useful way.
But with your voluble assistance, we quickly realized that some of our "improvements" simply weren't. One of the more congenial aspects of Web publishing is that you can learn from your errors; it's a more forgiving medium than newspaper or magazine publishing, where mistakes are more hard-wired and more expensive to correct.
So thanks for the ear-splitting feedback. With your help, we are making Salon a more logical and elegant place to roam around in. Perhaps against your will, you've become part of the Salon redesign process, and we appreciate it.
If we ever doubted it, we now know for certain how passionately many of you regard your daily (or more) dose of Salon. We're sorry we rattled that sense of deep attachment. We still have a lot to learn. And we trust you'll continue to let us know when we go wrong.
David Talbot
Editor
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