Design Update for the CBL

The China Blog List recently got a design update. It looks like this now:

China Blog List: site design update

For a while now, the CBL has been suffering from massive spam attacks. John B, the original architect of the current version, had already helped me implement simple filters and batch delete functions, but I was still just getting bombarded by automated spam blog submissions. Recent additions of a captcha on the submission page and a “check range” greasemonkey script (which allows me to check hundreds of spam submissions for deletion at once) have enabled me to get the problem under control.

Being back in control inspired me to do the long-overdue layout update. Now that I am back in control, I also have a lot of blog submission approving to do. If you’re one of those people that submitted a while ago and you feel like you’ve been waiting forever, this is the explanation. And I will get to your submission.

I still have a bit of work to do on the layout. It breaks in IE. I’m not overly concerned though. (Do real web designers still care about IE??)

Oh, and while I’m on the subject of web updates, be sure to check out Dave Lancashire’s latest contribution to ChinesePod: the ChinesePod Dictionary. Very cool!

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John Pasden

John is a Shanghai-based linguist and entrepreneur, founder of AllSet Learning.

Comments

  1. sorry, i forget the minutiae of former layout, isn’t it look exactly like this new design? same color same form to me. 😛
    anyway, glad to know that anti-spam be improved.

  2. Kastner,

    The actual content is almost the same, but the visual structure of the site has changed. (Basically, the “container” of the content.) This made it a bad layout for higher resolutions.

    (All that’s left of the old layout is this screencap.)

  3. John, I HATE… absolutely HATE IE… For a long time I just ignored IE browser compatibility much as IE ignores Web standards compliance. However, since going “pro”, I’ve found I really need to consider it – despite loathing so.

    I only go back as far as IE 6.0 in compatibility though. Anyone that’s using a browser older than that needs to be slapped (I even created a nifty little script to help slap them).

    I’ve a few good tools for checking layout in various browsers, etc… e-mail me if you want links. The redesign looks nice. Interesting to note that the top three spots in the “hot list” are held by female bloggers.

  4. In the somewhat distant past I’ve submitted my blog three times but nothing ever happened. It doesn’t fit any of the criteria for being rejected (at this moment I’m traveling but I do update it regularly) and it would be only the second blog to come from Gansu. Why hasn’t it been added?

    http://danteachesenglish.blogspot.com

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