New Reader Look
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@timethief AND WP staff
Let’s try to itemize…
– There is some kind of glitch when a post’s original layout uses the “square tiles” gallery type: the photos of the gallery appear distorted in the Reader (when the title is clicked)
– the Portrait photos are brutally chopped and mishandled, while landscape photos are like small like thumbnails. I can’t bear the sight of my (sometimes) minimalistic (or maximalistic) photos presented as a strip in the middle. You are killing photography for the sake of what exactly? I don’t get it…
– Too many clicks. You sacrificed scroll, which is easy and quick, for the enervating, tiring clicks and new windows; inexplicable…
– Unattractive layout. As the owner of a photography blog, lover of photos and graphic designer, I can say that the new Reader doesn’t do justice to Photography or Graphic design. It’s off-putting trying to guess (!) what a photo looks like. Please try for yourselves and see the “photography” tag. Do you like what you see, or rather what you don’t! I used to explore that tag daily and discover new blogs, but now it’s soooo frustrating. It’s impossible with all those “clicks” and “back” and “close”. Same thing with text: the titles and pics are so small, there’s a lot of info text too (also small) so the eye can’t focus on something, nothing stands out.
Plus not all bloggers are young of age… I am 40+ and I need my glasses AND a magnifying glass!
– Decrease of blog views and likes: it’s happening already… Why bother visit the blog if you see everything in the Reader.Please reconsider
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And one more thing:
some fellow bloggers question the Reader’s ability to bring views.
I checked my stats page from the beginning (2013) and WordPress Reader comes first by far (4.364 views) and second (2.908) are the search engines
So it works (sorry…. worked) for me… -
@pellymade and @dandelionsalad
Yes, I use the reader, though I always click through to people’s sites even if the whole post shows in the reader, since I like to give them the courtesy of my visit being recorded on their stats.
And yes, clicks through from the reader are a huge proportion of my own Stats, second only to clicks from search engines. Probably represents about 30-40% of visits, and far more interaction and return visits than search engines produce.
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It’s pretty awful. Photos look bad, cut in half or as small thumbnails. Very unappealing. Is this to save space or do folks in WordPress actually think that’s good? Ugh!
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I might like it. If I could see it! All I get is a blank screen, with the manage etc controls in a panel to one side. So, when’s it gonna get to the European side of the ocean, and what are we supposed to do in the meantime?
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I checked the Reader in my tablet and all I see is white… There’s the menu on the left but the
-Followed sites
-Discover
-Search
-Tags
are all dead… -
It would seem that, for now, the technical hitch regards my Reader screen has been resolved. So I now I can give my feedback. A little bit of forewarning would have been good. I have spent this afternoon redesigning the graphics I use as episode headers cos the new Reader totally savages them, cutting them in half resulting in loss of information. I’m not alone in being affected by this. I see several others have meaningless graphics. We shall get used to it and design our graphics accordingly. But as you note in the New Reader announcement, these graphics are an important element in our blogs, and often the reason a reader explores the blog.
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The new look stinks. Sorry if someone went to a lot of work to make it ‘pretty’ or more user friendly for smart phone users, but for those of us who don’t live and die by our cell phone and use an actually desk top computer, the reader is now jumbled and smashed together and looks horrible. It’s difficult to tell where one post starts and another ends. I’m not the only one in my particular blogging ‘group’ that thinks so either. I’m going to provide a link to this thread so they can come complain about it too. Why don’t you (if possible) use that new look for the cell phone crowd and leave the old one for the dinosaurs like me??
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It’s truly TERRIBLE. They have destroyed photographs posts in general. There are so many things wrong with this change. I’m going to try and find another way (email) to get to the blogs I follow and stop using the Reader, if I can. They keep making thins uglier and what they do ALWAYS takes more time and I’m so tired of it. Now they want us to go to ever site, even if we don’t have to, because we can’t actually SEE anything unless we do. Sucks, big time.
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I don’t mind the compressed version of the reader but like many, I am not a fan of going to a white page once a post title is clicked, rather than going to the actual blog site. It seems that carefully choosing a theme & spending time working on the look of your blog is but a waste of time if the first click in the reader only takes you to a blank page.
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Hello all! I’m catching up here and I will try to respond to the specific help requests. There are also other threads, including an official one, which I haven’t read through yet but I will also be helping out with soon!
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I love the look of it – much better than the old one. However, it seems to be showing the entire post when the title is clicked, whereas I have my posts set up only to show a summary. Can this please be changed? Otherwise there will be very little reason for people to click through to visit sites, which will make all our beautiful themes and widgets rather pointless. Thanks.
@fictionfanakaff, I just tested subscribing to your site and viewing it in the Reader, and I found that clicking on the title took me directly to the post on your blog. In my test, I clicked on the title from the main feed at https://wordpress.com/ (screenshot). What happens when you click on your own post titles from https://wordpress.com/ or are you using a different pathway to click through?
UPDATE: I was wrong! Clicking on a post title is supposed to take you to the Reader. I actually found a bug in my testing, which is that when any text is selected then clicking the post title goes straight to the blog. This will probably be updated though. Clicking on a post title in the Reader should take you to the full post view in the Reader even if you have the summary feed setting turned on. In case it’s helpful to some, you may press the command key on a Mac (try the control or windows key on Windows) while clicking to open the post directly.
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@timethief –
I’ve been with WP for about the same time you have been. It’ll be 11 years in early January. So few changes have been for the better, many are in the category of “what are they thinking?” I’ve never been a fan of reader since its inception. Many of us spend time crafting the layout and appearance, only to have the reader short-circuit the process. It doesn’t encourage anyone to visit a specific blog and perhaps reading more posts. In a year or so, reader will be “improved” again. -
@pellymade, I’m going to try to break down some of your feedback into smaller chunks as I reply:
The more I explore the new Reader the more ugly it gets. When the title is clicked some of my photos appear distorted.
Would it be possible for you to send me an example link where you’re seeing this so I can take a closer look?
Also the main photo is pretty small, like a thumbnail.
This is intended to help reduce the amount of scrolling, too much scrolling was a past complaint, and also to make the reading experience more like a magazine.
And in some cases, although there are more than one photo featured, I see only one.
This could be based on the size of the images. The minimum required width should be 350px. It could also be because an algorithm picks how to feature photos based on how many usable images it finds and also on the length of the auto-generated excerpt.
I’m still reading through the rest of your feedback! More soon.
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– There is some kind of glitch when a post’s original layout uses the “square tiles” gallery type: the photos of the gallery appear distorted in the Reader (when the title is clicked)
This is a bug! Thank you for reporting it! I found that the problem only appears in the full post view and only for square tiles as you mentioned. I’ve reported the problem to our developers for review.
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It seems to me this new change really undermines the words and thought put into everyone’s posts, compressing them into something remarkably similar to little advertising clips. If someone writes a poem, I’d love to see more than two lines so my interest can be sparked to read the whole piece. When so much emphasis is put on colorful, aesthetic pictures, it really warps and dilutes some blogger’s textual style.
Let’s try to protect our values on WordPress.
Please consider this demand for a better Reader format. -
@hermitcrablifeblog, thank you for your feedback. The goal for the current layout is to make it more like a magazine where readers can see more information per session (something many users have asked for is less scrolling) and then click through to a minimal view designed for readers so they can have a consistent view where they can read more in depth when they see something they like. Keep in mind the Reader is one specific use case and subscribers and people searching for content online and people who click through to your site will all have different experiences too. This view is one of many, and each reader may decide for themselves how to find and read content. We hope that the updates we make over time will help improve the reading experience for all the people at WordPress.com who get really into using the Reader!
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– the Portrait photos are brutally chopped and mishandled, while landscape photos are like small like thumbnails. I can’t bear the sight of my (sometimes) minimalistic (or maximalistic) photos presented as a strip in the middle. You are killing photography for the sake of what exactly? I don’t get it…
This is really good feedback. It’s not something we can changed right away, but there are several proposals in the works about how to solve the problem algorithmically which will take some time to implement but that appear to me to be a priority for the next major update. What I can do to help right now from a support perspective is gather feedback on it, including specific examples if you have any you’d like to share!
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Clicking on a post title is supposed to take you to the Reader.
When one clicks a post link one expects to be arriving on the site where the post is published. Arriving at any location other than where the post is published when clicking a post permalink is dodgy behavior IMNHO.
Please clearly state the cogent reasoning of the developers and powers that be for this unexpected and unwelcome behavior. We expect to have anyone clicking a permalink post title to be driven to the site the post was published on and to benefit that site. What useful purpose to the site where the post was published flows from inconveniencing readers those who click the permalinked title to posts to be driven back to where they came from?
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