As you can see, we have a spiffy new website, thanks to Greg at hexive and the Ploughshares Fund. (I also want to add a special note of thanks for Derek de Jong, aka Stratwonk, for many many hours of effort.)
Although the visual changes are the most obvious — is the nuclear bomb effects computer awesome or what? — the changes behind the curtain are most impressive to me. We’ve moved to a nested model where contributors have their own blogs. So if you loathe me, but love Josh Pollack, you can just follow him at pollack.armscontrolwonk.com.
The main site, Arms Control Wonk.com, will serve as a global aggregator for the entire family of ACW blogs, as well as my own idiosyncratic musings. This should allow us to bring you a lot more content from a lot more voices, without becoming a cacaphony. And did I mention it looks good?
The launch has been somewhat delayed and we are still trying to figure out how this new model is going to work in practice. So you will probably seem some subtle design changes and other hiccups for a few weeks, until we hit our stride.
This is the third version of Arms Control Wonk. With the last major relaunch of the site, I wrote a tiny manifesto in an explicit attempt to offer a post hoc rationalization for the existence of this thing of ours. I may do that again, but before putting fingers to keys, I invite your comments about what you, dear readers, hope for and expect from this site in the months and years ahead.
And, as always, thanks for reading.
Congratulations on the new look and improved platform. I like the nuclear bomb effect calculator….I have a collection of these cold war relics.
Very good job! I was a bit worried the website would radically change, but no. You kept what makes the blog’s strength : simplicity, clarity, and it’s more colourful now!
The quality will, I’m sure, not decrease!
Very nice. It’s easy on the eye and I’ve always liked the rounded box style. One request though, there is no facility to see how many comments have been made about an article when you reach the end of it. Currently, this information is only at the begining of the article so one either has to process this first then read the article or scroll back up to find it after reading the article. It’s probably only a personal thing but I like to read an article and then see if it’s popular with commentators rather than the other way round.
But on a general note thanks for an excellent resource, I visit everyday and it’s well regarded here in Vienna.
We may be able to overlay the comment count number on the comment icon at the bottom of the post. I’ll stick it on the to-do list. Thanks for the suggestion!
Hey WonkyBook, we got this request in. If you happen back to these comments let us know how it works for you!
Many thanks for that – From my perspective it’s a great improvement!
And for all of you who don’t know Jeffrey, his head really is that much bigger than the rest of his body.
Looks very nice. The font size is a little bit too small, though, and the font type isn’t very readable (which might be due to the size) either. I’d prefer a classic web font type… but still, good job, nicely done! (and yes, that nuclear bomb effects computer IS awesome!)
I bumped page text from 13pt to 14pt. Noticeable? Adequate?
Congratulation !! A really great change. The new look is so good that I already have forgotten how the site looked before. The server is much faster now and looks like the transition was done without any bump in the road.
Ataune
Looks good! I especially like the homage to “Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” even if, as Felix points out, it isn’t the most readable thing in the world.
Now you just need a looping MIDI file playing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”…
Very nifty look indeed. But one think I really miss from the old layout are the next/previous article links, and doubly so because all articles no longer show full text on the front page.
Derek got this in today. The next/previous links move you though individual author’s posts (but not globally through the site). We’re working on that and some better global tools like ‘related articles’ that should make browsing by subject matter easier as well.
I love the color and the fact you can sort by author. Great job!
The Nuclear Bomb Effects Computer reminded me of the effects spinner from the “Nuclear War” game – I presume this was a deliberate allusion by the designers, but I had no idea.
Clearly three hip-hips to Pablo Ferro are in order:
Opening credits to Dr. Strangelove
http://videosift.com/video/Opening-credits-to-Dr-Strangelove
Pablo Ferro and Dr. Strangelove
http://kottke.org/08/04/pablo-ferro-and-dr-strangelove
Pablo Ferro – 2009 AIGA Medalist
http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/medalist-pabloferro
Congratulations on the elegant new look.
Is it intended/necessary that old resource URLs no longer work? Would be nice if they could somehow be retained/redirected. eg
http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/files/MND_slides.pdf
Thanks.
Thanks for your comment; we’re very cognizant about trying to retain legacy post and file addresses. We had configured the server to check for the old files before having the blog redirect the request, but it wasn’t taking precedence. This has now been fixed, and it should check for the file first.
Thanks again!
I miss the article tags, I used to use them to quickly check if anything new had been posted about North Korea. I really miss them, if possible I’d love to see you bring them back.
This is on our radar. We want post tags, categories and searches to be global across all author blogs which is going to take a little development work to get just right. Thanks for your patience.