New look Monitor
13:41 UK time, Monday, 11 September 2006
Welcome to the new-look Magazine Monitor which, after a stable and orderly transition, is now open for business.
One of the benefits of this regime change are that clicking the icons on the right-hand-side will take you to archives for each feature, eg: a collection of all caption competitions. This is surely a good thing.
Another is that there are RSS feeds of the Monitor, or of individual features. Or even better, you could use , which will include the three most recent Monitor features.
But apart from those changes, it will be pretty much business as usual. Submit letters in the usual fashion, please, using the form on the right hand side of the page. Blog-style comments will be open on items which lend themselves to comments, such as Punorama, but otherwise the daily routine of quiz results, Paper Monitor and Your Letters will continue like finely tuned clockwork. Except sometimes on Thursdays.
And there will be some new features too, including, later today, Pronunciation of the Week, which joins the Monitor having had a very successful run on The Editors, our sister blog.
You might have noticed a few changes on the Magazine itself, including the introduction of new colour, the name of which we're not quite sure. Any suggestions welcome - add your comments here and now, or send us a letter for later.
Comments
May i be the first to welcome the new style monitor! You're going to take a bit of getting used to i think, and you could do with some pictures on this page, but i'm willing to give you a go...
Well, this will take a bit of getting used to. I'm not keen on the bluey-greeny-grey colours.
Nice.
I like it!
Seems a little bit squished over to the left, with a fair amount of wasted screen way over there on the right. But overall I quite like it.
I really like the new colour scheme and structure.
The only thing I don't like is the size of the headline of the leading story - it's bigger than the headlines used on other news pages, and so when I revisit the page after looking away, for a split second I think I'm looking at a major event posted on the news homepage (since a similar font size is used for those events). I'd much prefer it if the headline size was consistent across the site.
I like the colour scheme, but this as with all the other blogs seems crushed in to the lefthand side.
Yes - pretty good in terms of organisation. Have an extra gold star for maintaining the permalinks to old Monitor items, which means I don't have to change all of my website's links to my thousands of ±«Óãtv-published letters!
I's called teal. I don't like it.
I did like having the navbar on the left to allow me to browse effortlessly back to the news. But otherwise I'm not too upset
Only complaint is that as with all ±«Óãtv News websites, the whole site is displayed in the left-hand side of my screen. I appreciate that I have a big screen and that it's designed to not use it all, but if it was centred it would be much better!
"eg: a collection of all caption competitions. This is surely a good thing."
On the defensive already are we?
The colour is not quite Teal, there's too much grey in it to be true Teal. I have scanned various paint manufacturers' catalogues but without sucess ("meadow blush" or "ocean breeze" anyone?) How about giving it a new name of its own? I suggest "Moniteal (tm)"
I sense a new Monitor quiz coming on! Name that colour!
I agree - far to squished to the left - for some reason it seems harder to read text which starts right at the left hand edge of the screen as the letters now do. Please can we have the left hand nav bar back?
i like the bluey-beigey colours, and am about to redecorate my living-room in what i now think of as 'monitor style'.
Um. Not sure about the colours/squished stuff... looks a bit too much like a standard blog. I especially dislike a) the layout b) the colour c) the silly partial underlining of hyperlinks d) the unintuitive layout of the links on the right hand side e) the lack of ±«Óãtv nav bar and most read section.
The content's OK though.
More 'petrel' than 'teal', I think...
Hmm, i can't drag-highlight text anymore, which i always did to keep my place when i scrolled back to yesterdays letters, or something. this may get some getting used to...
In the USA it's called Persian Blue. Yes, the screen is squished to the left. I keep looking at the bottom of the screen to move the scroll bar, but with no luck.
A link back to the ±«Óãtv News front page, or to the Magazine front page at least, maybe on top of the screen, would be useful.
Otherwise, very nice.
Why no link back to the news page? The ±«Óãtv News icon in the top left is an obvious candidate, otherwise, looks nice.
I don't like it, I'm kind of leaning to the left to get the best view.
its awful.
bring back the old way.
i can't stand things over to the
left.
I think the colour is KittenSickGrey.
I echo all the comments about the width (or lack thereof) of the columns and lack of quick news links along the left (I usually look at the Magazine on my way to Have Your Say).
However, this new format does mean that we're pretty much guaranteed to get our comments published, imperceptible witticisms or no.
Was this particular regime change the result of a UN resolution?
Just call the colour #367 as it is coded in the style-sheet. Not too catchy, but our teenager got into web design recently and more recently told us what colour she wanted to redecorate her room in #FFFFFF (RGB) colour format (though not that colour, 'cos that's "white").
Anyway, why can't the whole width of the screen be used? There is that big empty white bit down the right not doing anything. Is that reserved for future adverts or something?
I think the reason the squished to the left thing is so annoying is because it means if you're focused on the long thin strip of letters, about a third of your field of vision (the bit to the left of the letters) isn't looking at the monitor - which makes the screen seem too bright.
If you 'restore down' the window - i.e. don't have it on full screen, you can move it over yourself, which is a bit better.
and I agree with Mark etc about the link back to News - felt almost claustraphobic as I couldn't get out...
If you don't like the content being on the left, why don't you move your browser window to the right?
Well done, looks nice! The RSS-feeds and feature-based archives are good additions.
The possibility of commenting individual items will drastically increase the number of readers' comments published on the site. Is the end nigh for the kudos earned from published monitor letters?
Or will there be a two-tier system where the blog-style comments are "dumbed down" and a case of "anything goes" while you still need the nearly imperceptable witticism to get through to the letters of the day?
Oh, one suggestion: to make Monitor less of a dead end, you could make the ±«Óãtv News -square in the top banner a link back to the News main page.
Monitor I love you. ignore these people complaining about your dashing new looks. You are now truly beautiful.
Except for the colour - way to corporate to have that nice homely feel.
And why the left? Are you turning everso-slightly socialist on us?
As with all new things, the new Monitor will take a bit of getting used to. But on the whole I like it, particularly as the new "institutional" colour scheme means I can read it in the office without appearing to be blantantly reading something "fun"... which Monitor is course!
Love those RSS feeds - I've now got lots of little orange buttons on my Mozilla bookmarks bar to play with. All that blank real-estate on the right could bring in some serious advertising revenue, (oops, sorry, forgot ..!)
I'm not a fan of the colors I'm afraid - it clashes far too much at the top!
Otherwise, i'm liking it :)
i haven't noticed any changes.
To TH:
Two-teir system or not, I can at last get something published!
Still, I'll continue in my hopeless quest to get something published in letters of the day/ punorama/ caption competition (anything at all really)
Love the new colours, and style (the icons on the right, very neat).
I agree that the news icon should be linked to the news index though.
And to all those who are asking abour the right-hand space: The simple answer is that there are still a large ammount of users with screens set to use smaller resolutions than yours - mainly 800x600 - and without having a space (granted it could all be centred) they'll be forced to have hideous horizontal-scrollbars and have to scroll to see all of the Magazine. :)
I don't like it. Is everything on the ±«Óãtv site going to be slimmed down to be a blog? It looks a lot more lightweight and dull. Sorry!
I don't like it at all.
The Monitor was special, because it wasn't just another tedious blog. It took only a few moments to read, and the letters were mostly good as they were handpicked (and, yes, I did get one published). Now with all this additional opportunity to comment, are people actually going to strive to write exceptional letters, when they could just write some pfiffle here?? Like I am doing now.