Comments on: Monday Morning Feedback: How Do You CDM?

By: Peter Kirn

Peter Kirn — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 01:21:14 +0000

Thanks for all the kudos! It really helps keep us going when we hear nice things, truly.

Streamlining and improving load time: hearing you loud and clear. We’ll be diagnosing this and should come up with a solution.

Meanwhile, I think a “punch the monkey” link on each post — for its own sake — might be just what we need. ;)

By: orb9

orb9 — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 18:30:45 +0000

First of all: CDM rocks!

I vote yes for an ajax search.
I vote no on digg/delicious buttons.
I don’t use Gravatars.
I used the arrow button once, but then sticked to the standard scrolling.
A preview for comments would be nice.
Keep up the good work!

By: funnelbc

funnelbc — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 07:44:39 +0000

I view cdm in two main ways. Firstly I visit in a browser, and it’s daily visit.

But I also visit it via the google reader, and that works just lovely for quick news catchup.

As far as CDM user blogs could go, maybe an alternative (and a way of keeping it fast moving and interesting for visitors) is to have a possible interface where users could blog stuff they’re interested in and have it feed into the 1 blog. A real community weblog.

Just a thought. Now I shall have some more wasabi peas and beer. (hot and in Australia)

By: velocipede

velocipede — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 01:46:20 +0000

I usually start in RSS and jump to the site for longer sites. RSS is a nice way to know that there is something new.
I would like a user blog on this site. Sometimes I want to write something in more detail, like the Handsonic review, and think it might serve the community more here than on a lonely blog out in the ether of my own creation. It would be cool if you guy picked up the best user blog posts for the front page.

By: ryan

ryan — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 17:36:06 +0000

Didn’t ever notice the ‘Gravatars’, although i follow the site via RSS now. also please don’t put the Digg/Del.icio.us buttons on the feed, they crash my blackberry when i am browsing a feed that uses them.

By: Dustin

Dustin — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 15:24:48 +0000

My google homepage CDM RSS feed is the first place my eyes go to when I sit down at work. The news coming out of CDM is most always entertaining.

By: primusluta

primusluta — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 15:19:55 +0000

I have the RSS feed which usually gives the whole article with pics. I think the design is great but I don’t come for the design, I come for the writing.

By: Thomas Swift

Thomas Swift — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 13:14:24 +0000

First off I remember the original CDM, and the improvements were tremendous.

I use NetNewsWire to subscribe. I use the main feedburner feed address for the regular updates, but I love how wordpress creates a feed for comments for a post, so please dont change that. I subscribe to a certain post for a little while then remove it.

I vote YES for an ajaxy search.
I vote NO on digg/delicious buttons.
I’m impartial to gravatar, i’d dont use it but it only take a few seconds to put in the regular graphic.

I never really used the up down arrow graphic. Didn’t really know what they were for until this was pointed out by this post. but it is pretty cool.

Also impartial on WYSIWYG, but a preview would be nice.

Regardless of your future choices and if what i say matters or not. This site rules.

Keep it up CDM crew. Also, props on CDMotion!

By: Jaymis Loveday

Jaymis Loveday — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 12:36:27 +0000

Thanks for the vote of confidence Vlad ;) I personally believe that “if it ain’t broke…” has never been the motto of innovative humans. We’re definitely not going to add “features” for the sake of adding things, but we’re not going to sit on our laurels either. Note that I’m actually considering deleting features which I’ve spent reasonably chunks of my time developing, because I think they may actually detract from the site due to added complexity or loading time.

JM: one of the things we’ve been working on is a way to minimize the advertising which is already in place, so you’ll never see any spanky monkeys on CDM! I feel similarly about digg buttons, but I’m also aware that I use the net in a very ideosyncratic way, so I’m keen to hear how other people work.

Asger: I believe that the slow loading times are often due to gravatars (on individual pages) or embedded youtube videos. Sites which use the sIFR headlines (flash-based font replacement) are unfortunately more obvious when they load slowly because they wait until every image and embed on the page is loaded before replacing the text. If youtube is down (which happens surprisingly often for a company which is apparently worth multiple billions of dollars) this means the browser just sits waiting to finish loading, the flash doesn’t replace and everything basically sucks :)

Interesting to see people adopting google reader. It looks great to me but unfortunately it doesn’t work with my browser of choice, Opera. If the feed works fine in Reader I’m happy though.

Thanks for the comments guys, this is all useful and important for us.

By: Rosco Picotrain

Rosco Picotrain — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 11:53:27 +0000

I like the site. I never use the interpost navigation. I also find the front page quite slow to render — both in firefox and safari — maybe simplifying the page layout would help. The most annoying thing about the design is that to get to the older posts you click the “next” button and to get to more recent posts you click “previous”. This is backwards! I guess “older” and “newer” would be better labels.