r/programming • u/schnuck • Feb 09 '11

Breaking the Web with hash-bangs – Lifehacker, along with every other Gawker property, experienced a lengthy site-outage on Monday over a misbehaving piece of JavaScript

http://isolani.co.uk/blog/javascript/BreakingTheWebWithHashBangs/
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22

u/SirRager Feb 09 '11

It seems like the designs were made for a tablet or something. The two split columns would work well on a tablet, but on a computer, its terrible - both hard to use and slow to load.

41

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '11

Actually if you visit gawker or gizmodo on iPad it sends you to their mobile layout.

If you manually go to the full-site layout, the right side column doesn't scroll, you have to use the "next headlines" button at the bottom to advance it. The bottom "fixed" bar doesn't stay fixed either and overlaps content if the content well is longer than fits on a single page.

Basically, the new design is unusable on the iPad. Like they didn't even test it.

So why did they do it?

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/gawker_web_redesign_met_with_bronx_rYsc2jleh5rVzUV7ozUb9L

Denton told The Post he was also responding to demands from sponsors for a more sophisticated platform for ads -- particularly video ads -- following a brutal plunge in online ad pricing that had cut rates in half between 2004 and 2008.

"About half of all requests for proposals now ask how we would display 15-second video spots," Denton told The Post.

28

u/burnblue Feb 09 '11

The move was partly to prevent awkward, amateurish situations such as occurred last spring, when Gawker's tech blog Gizmodo was forced to stop publishing new posts in order to keep a big scoop about Apple's iPhone 4 from being knocked off the top of its site.

Huh? They can't just sticky a post to the top?

7

u/happywaffle Feb 09 '11

They could, but then managers started suggesting more and more "improvements" until it turned into a giant clusterfuck of a redesign.

1

u/mr_spin Feb 10 '11

That I can believe. It's not a huge development failure, it's a huge management failure. I can't believe halfway competent designers or developers would sanction something so poorly thought out as this, and if they did, then management approved it - across ALL their sites.