pitchfork missed their "new site" rollout deadline

What about Tomato and Underworld?

Why not?

"Hey we'll give you guys a couple of 9.2s if you do our site."

Conflict of Interest? Who cares!!!

..Chewing Gum!"

Unless we remember that old time classic "Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor On The BedPOST Overnight?"

Hey guys, here's your new website!
http://namm.harmony-central.com/SNAMM02/Content/Steinberg/PR/Cubase-SL-large.jpg

Missing deadlines is nothing new for p'fork but to explain the site is only 85% complete surprises me. They were never going to meet yesterday's deadline so we did they continue to advertise it? Smacks of the amateurism that pervades much of the indie-web, no matter how flash-y and design-y the frontend may (one day) look.

Thanks for gloating.

And as far as I understand it, we were very close, but to put it delicately, were let down by the programmer. I've worked in software for ten years, with far bigger companies than Pitchfork, and this kind of delay is not exclusive to the indie-web.

however, i think it'll be a lot more difficult to charge premium ad rates when you don't deliver on deadlines and commitments in this fashion. this "hey it's indie so no one expects it to actually operate properly" bullshit grows increasingly tiresome, especially when coupled with the "hey we're not the only ones fucking up". (and a hint: neither one does you any favors in the long run)

better luck next time.

You can say whatever you want about my writing.

(ps: lighten up, i'm not trying to attack you, merely having some fun with the situation)

x-post

The simplistic stereotyping of Dweebs (all the men were like grown-up classroom swots) may have made for easy laughs but it seriously limited the scope of the show. There was no real depth of characterisation: all the men behaved like social losers, and although each had his own particular idiosyncrasies - Warren was inarticulate, Morley was strange, Vic was wild - collectively they were as one. The trendy settings - high-tech office, internet café - also somehow undermined the old-fashioned nature of the show, with its moral espousing that 'nerds are people too'. While it served up plenty of bytes, indeed, it sorely lacked bite. CBS deleted the show after just seven episodes.

peter scolari wonders how tom hanks became the famous one!

(haha xpost as if on cue.)

-- mark p (mark.p****...), January 11th, 2005.

i hope you're including yourself in that "self-satisfied" group of flies

hopefully he'll have learned his lesson next time around.

in the meantime, i'm enjoying the mental image of ryan's headshot dancing on ashlee simpson's hoedown jig body. if i were not at work, with a bit more free time, perhaps i'd make an animated gif of it

*except if it happens to a !FREE! music news website!

It would be cool if each page had one article and a NEXT and PREV link, and as you clicked NEXT you'd go deeper into the archive until 6,000 clicks later, you'd have Ryan's first review.

I think a few suggestions here and elsewhere are worthwhile, e.g. considering a darker shade for text, linking to a review from the subhead as well as the header, restoring the bullet points on the content page sidebar links, etc. Thanks for those.

Ideally, the most striking and welcome thing about this change will be the increase in content. There should (again, ideally -- no more guarantees about what will be done and when ;) ) be six additional featues/week, daily rather than sporadic updates to the track reviews, and from here on out things like list features (there will be half-00s single/LP lists in a few weeks) will reside in the 'weekly feature' section alongside regular daily updates rather than be the sum total of the site's new content for three days in a row, as was the case with the 70s LP list, etc.

I think my biggest bitch is that if this was three columns wide, it'd be a really awesome design. As it is, I like to have my web browser take the majority of my screen, but I had to expand it a little wider to not have horizontal scrollbars.

Three columns, nav at top (and a smaller banner), and secondary pages THAT ACTUALLY WORKED would be great. For instance, I wanted to see a listing of all recent reviews, so I clicked "reviews." It gave me a page that just dumped all the reviews in one center column, and it jumped from 01-11-05 to 12-17-04. For the love of all that is holy, they've done one thing right (the url: /record-reviews/ is a good identifier) but the page should show *all* recent reviews, starting from today. This isn't a blog, you're allowed to show all reviews on the review page, not just ones that have expired off the front page.

Did the design company do any usability testing at all? I might be talking from a more corporate standpoint here, but it's mandatory on all the apps/sites I've worked on.

Clearly, the most common complaint on the thread is the width. Again, I really think each of the content columns need to be shrunk a bit.

not sortable, though.

It shipped on Tuesday but only to some retailers (EB, Gamestop, etc.) Hope you like it.

I emailed them a long, long time ago about this and got scott's suggestion to use the search. Nice, but what if the reviewer just gets mentioned in another article? I have the impression that no one wants to ever change the pitchfork database or do more than very minimal web coding, so all we'll ever see is facelifts like the last couple changes. And maybe some more random banner advertisements.

It shipped on Tuesday but only to some retailers (EB, Gamestop, etc.) Hope you like it.

Mercs dev team represent!!

haibun gets runner up then for stylus comment upthread.

I finally got it - drove through the sleet yesterday to pick it up. I like it a lot! I'm still coming down off of Half-Life 2 (which I grew to like more after I finished it than I ever did when I was playing it ... if that makes sense), but this is a good game to move on to.

On a 800x600 display visitors see only two columns and three flashing adds.

Any designer worth their salt would realize a text-based site such as a magazine, newspaper, blog, etcetera shouldn't move beyond 748px width to ensure proper display on over 90% of all systems in use. Current figures put 800x600 users at 50% of the web while 45% of users display at 1024x768 or more. There is no paradigm-shift around the corner -- this is the way web-viewing is going to be for a while...

For all the JavaScript rendering and controlling the site, a simple detection script could calculate maximum screen resolution and load a user-specific stylesheet to ensure proper display for all visitors.

Pitchfork is not a Hi-res art project and it isn't a Praystation experiment, it's a music publication... ... perhaps traffic statistics for the site indicated a disproportionate number of +1024px visitors but those statistics don't mean a thing if the pfork's intention is to grow readership.

Staffers -- any idea want kind of directives Someoddpilot had in this regard?

p.s. Interesting to note that the staff page has been cut-and-pasted from the old design. Lazy is as lazy does.

well, we both started them independently; staff members from pfm/stylus who are friendly with one another learned that the other site was planning similar lists weeks ago. Ryan and I talked about doing this before the ILx half-00s list began, if that matters. (it shouldn't - especially since it's obviously not the most unique idea in the world!)

It's way too busy for me to look at. Most new websites are, though. I hate all the clutter, the absence of which is what I love about ILX. It's simply so unnecessary. The constant updates, too: how many different colour schemes have they tried now? i remember when i wrote news for them in 2000, getting asked to test out new designs every 4 months. there was a red one, and a black/tan one, dark blue, light blue, a series of teal... just stick with something that works, and be done!

i use 800x600, and rarely read pitchfork anymore just due to the sidescroll. again, it's not necessary! when did minimal design go out of style, and WHY?

www.google.com

ahhh - music to my ears .. and spot on re one design and stick to it ..

www.ireallylovemusic.co.uk

then again i am seriously lazy.

http://waltminkthemovie.typepad.com/production_blog/2004/03/sqb_ryan_schrei.html

http://www.corriere.it/Hermes%20Foto/2003/10_Ottobre/22/0HN43C0H--180x230.jpg

'<p style="margin: 11px">'

hahahahahahahaha