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As you can see, OpenID support seems to be working nicely. :-)

And apparently so is the comment mechanism. iChat's got nothing on us!

Dear Magic 8 Ball,

Will our dzone accounts be usable as openID accounts?

Hi pcx99, we're expecting to add OpenID server functionality very soon. You'll be able to use your dzone credential anywhere OpenID is accepted.

Dzone cred -- heh, I like! Thanks much!

Oh, cloud and top users are gone too (for the moment). Here're the links in case anyone wanted them:

http://www.dzone.com/users/top/promoted.html
http://www.dzone.com/links/queue/cloud.html

And higher quality icons... make sure you upload a new personal avatar...

Wow. Just Wow. Really, really nice stuff.

The only critisism is that I think downvotes will eventually choke dzone just the way it has reddit (when was the last time you saw actual code in the top ten on reddit? right -- it's all generic lowest common denominator opinion pieces and haskel articles). Upvotes only (and I'm in favor of canceling votes!) tend to give each "faction" their share of the popular links. This means beginner articles will show up even though advanced users would mark them down as uninteresting and vice-versa. If there enough pascal users they'll get their articles just like the C and Javascript guys. Upvoting is democratic, downvoting is the tyrany of the majority. Maybe Dzone will be different, I hope it will, but really I suspect Dzone will probably be the worse for it.

Two usability criticisms.

1. Placing /large/ onmouseover dropdowns right above the Tags, Popular, and Newest tabs requires precision mousehandling to avoid mouse gymnastics. Maybe a short delay before the dropdown appears would avoid that?

2. Upcoming Links splits the article blurb and blurb-relevant comments. Not sure why, but that doesn't seem "right." It looks out of place, as if the comments shouldn't be spaced down that far from the blurb.

Hardly end-of-the-world type of stuff. I do like the general look and feel. It's better, overall. =)

You're right on both counts, anotherbob

#1 - I totally agree with you, and it is our intention to look for someone who knows Javascript well enough to help implement a proper delay that makes that upper-left block a whole lot more courteous. It is presently a pure CSS implementation based on changing styles on :hover rules, which explains why it is so relentlessly immediate. It will definitely change.

#2 - The upcoming links block is just a placeholder for a much more interesting "Related links" block, but the related links mechanism isn't fully finished. Once the related links are in place I think it will feel less like an interruption of the flow. Good eye!

Thanks for the feedback. Please keep it coming.

Rick

There's no need to use javascript. Move the ad block below the tags and have the adblocks pop up instead of down. This moves content to the forefront of the column making it more likely people will actually look at it (and I'd kinda recommend starting out with the popular tab instead of tags, it's more interesting content) which means people are more likely to see (and use the ad tags right below it) and no mouse gymnastics (or javascript) will be required :)

I'm *really* liking the changes so far. It's very 2.0 ;)

Thanks for the encouraging reply. =)

I'm no javascript pro, but wrt #1, perhaps you could use a settimeout call for onmouseover and a cancellation for onmouseout?

Some suggestions for the next version!

* Everywhere you offer an XML feed, offer it in JSON as well (I need to do this for my site as well), why make people go through yahoo pipes when they can get it straight from the tap? This is my most #1 desired feature.

* implement markdown in the comments (reddit uses it and I just put a markdown link in upcomming: http://www.attacklab.net/showdown-gui.html )

* Saved/Shared is especially nice, I really like the separation between votes, bookmarks, and recommendations. Saved needs a few features though. User definable folders, custom tags, searching on custom tags only within your saved file (maybe on a folder-by-folder basis as well), and searching on the title/description within your saved tags. In the "out there" area, save a text copy of the stored pages and allow full text searching on the text contents that have been saved and if you *really* want to blow people away make a firefox extension which will show you dzone bookmarks as a bookmark menu item (basically the same as "bookmarks" but titled "dzone" maybe, and that menu shows your saved items). Oh yea, you can allow exporting saved files as a standard bookmark .html export file, that would be cool too :)

* Still no general forum? Think of all the page-views you're missing and the flame-wars and... oh. well still... It works for javalobby!

* Allow our user accounts to work as openID accounts for other services.

* Allow users to private-message each other.

* Revamp the "my account" page so it can be used as a blog if people want (you have all the tools, it shouldn't be too hard!)

* Allow us to find posts we've commented on but keep it anything more than what you're showing now private. Nobody should be able to do a search on you or your nym and pull up comments you made a decade ago to profile the way you are now..., but finding stuff you've commented on is useful when you're looking for a specific article. DZone is the only aggregation service that gets comment archival right IMHO.

Heh, some of us are *NEVER* satisfied, don't take it personally, I love the new site almost as much as I love feature creep!

According to Firebug (which you really should be using if you're not), you're loading 13 separate javascript files and 8 css files on each page view (along with a bunch of images, of course).

A few things from someone who does a lot of javascript heavy development:
- use something like Dojo compressor (or Mozilla Rhino directly) to compress the javascript code itself
- combine the javascript into files for each page during your project build (there is an ant task to compress javascript floating around somewhere) so you end up with 'main-page.js', 'comment-view.js' that includes all the libraries those pages need
- use conditional gzip compression depending on user agent (< IE6 SP1 breaks on compressed javascript/css)
- send no-cache headers for all css/javascript, then put the media in a version prefixed directory 'v1.0/css/asdf.css' so the new versions will be picked up without worrying about cache expiration
- load images and css from subdomains (image.dzone.com, media.dzone.com)... that includes user avatars

A lot of the above has to do with the fact that most browsers (IE/FF/Opera) have a cap that keeps them from keeping more than 2 connections open... so all those avatar pics have to wait for those 13 javascript files to load, which in turn have to wait for the 8 css files, etc... The connection limit is per domain though, so offloading media to separate domains allows more connections to be open and less blocking to occur.

Thanks for the feedback, combining these into one file would certainly be useful. If you have any suggestions, please send them to feedback at dzone.com.

Looks great! It doesn't render 100% correctly in Safari though..

So far I like the new interface with one small exception. The 300x250 add under the tags/popular/newest overlaps that section on my screen (1280x800 on a laptop). Not a huge thing, just a minor nuisance.

One thing I do like is the auto retrieval as you scroll down the list. It took me a couple minutes to realize it was doing this. The loading graphic was subtle (don't change it) and just thought my browser hung for a second.

Nice work

Oh, one small feature request. Allow us the option (via our profile) to open links in a new window. For those of us on FireFox this works great as I have new windows open in a new tab. I like not losing my place or having to hit the back button several times.

This is there already :-)

Go to your profile page, click on "Edit my settings", and check the "Open links in a new window" checkbox (about 3/4 of the way down

Then click save, and you're done :-)

Thanks bloid, don't know how I missed that one!