The Standard--Examiner Live! Edition Has Been "Upgraded"

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it," as the old saying goes

By Curmudgeon

The Standard-Examiner's new on line page is now up. Sort of. [They're still stamping out gremlins over there and much that wasn't working earlier today seems to be working now.]

It is touted as a grand improvement. In some ways, possibly it is. Possibly. But there are two "improvements" that seem to me bad ideas.

1. The old page contained, as soon as it came up, ten or a dozen lead stories --- the headlines and a one sentence lede. You could scan quickly and click on the story your wanted. The "improved" version now puts up only five stories, with much longer excerpts. At the top of the page, there is a picture box with fifteen numbered buttons below it. The top fifteen stories scroll through that box, one a time coming up every few seconds. So to see all the stories available, other than what the SE thinks are the top five, you have to either wait for the box to scroll through until the story you want comes up, or you have to click through the number tags, one at a time, until you find the story you want, if it's there. If yours happens to be number 14 or 15, or it's not on the scroll through list at all, you're going to do either a lot of clicking or a lot of waiting to find that out. The old system which provided instant access to the top ten or twelve stories immediately [and let you know if the story you wanted was not there so you could do a search for it right off], was, I think, much faster and easier to use. Much more user friendly, as they say.

2. The "most recent comments" box has disappeared entirely. Gone. I don't know about others, but I found that box very useful, and a fast way to pick upon the current on-going conversations. Now I'd have to note the number of comments on every story I was interested in, and when I come back later, remember what that number was to know if, when the story came up, any new comments had been added. And if the story I was interested in wasn't one of the top five, I'd have to either wait or click through to even see the number of comments attached to that story. The "latest comments" list was fast, and useful. And it's apparently gone gone gone. Why?