new Word Press front page and VIP blogs
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WordPress has a revised front page. The ‘News Departments’ have gone, in favour of a new front page featuring ‘Hot VIP posts’ and ‘Hot Community posts’. This has been in place for several days now although there hasn’t been an announcement of the change.
I admit to being sceptical of the value of ‘News Departments’ on the front page when they were first introduced – but over time I really came to appreciate them as a varied supply of different material from around WordPress. This is where you could find interesting opinions on a range of different subjects.
The new format front page seems like a real backward step, not least because the selection of VIP blogs focuses largely on the trivial and technical, and seems to be taking us firmly back into cheezburger and scoble spaces which were so widely criticised. Those sites were popular, but you didn’t really want to see the front page fixed on them for every single day. Meanwhile, the community posts don’t seem to follow an easily navigable pattern either – but are a rather limited subset of the top few posts on the WordPress list. Most of the variety has gone.
I haven’t seen any comments on this so far, and I’d be interested in hearing other people’s views before I send off my support ticket. I’d be strongly in favour of returning to the ‘News Departments’ format. Anyone else agree with me here, or disagree?
Thanks in advance for your views, and kind regards from London.
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I agree the old “News Departments” were more interesting, but I think it was hard to pin down a Post by subject because it was the tags/categories on the Post that were being used to determine it’s placement in the “News Departments”. The tags/categories didn’t always reflect the Post content well. http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2007/08/06/categories-and-news-departments/
Now both the “more” links on the Front Page under “Hawt Post” and “Hot VIP Posts” and “Hot Community Posts” leads to the “Top Posts” page. Perhaps it’s a decision to base the selection on leading Posts. Less interesting, certainly. Better? (shoulder shrug) A temporary shift of content on the way to something else? Who knows.
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I also notice that clicking on any of the more links brings you
to the same page with the same articles.I’m also in favor of the “News Department” being back on the front
page..This new setup reminds me of a social network site.
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the news department wasn’t bad, but, they should add more tags, and I think it should change alot quicker than before.. I mean for days I’d see the same blog up there, of course the stats on the blog were going up, but for that one particular post, no comments, cus it was crap.
I’ve been hawt post a few times, and I can’t figure out how, how do wordpress work this out? -
I’m not sure why anyone would want to go to the WordPress.com front page, unless it’s to sign up for a new blog. We’re united by our use of wp.com, but apart from that, it’s a tremendously diverse community.
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Since the home page changed I have been getting more referrals from wordpress.com
but I can’t find were people are finding my post. ? -
It sucks, wtf?!
When we had news departments, we had more posts on the front page (better ones in my opinion) and the “more” link took you to MORE posts, not just the same regurgitated ones from the homepage.
If this is strictly a “highest-number-of-hits” algorithm, small (but well written and interesting) blogs are at a huge disadvantage. What’s going to float to the top is a bunch of inflammatory spewing of uninformed imbeciles who write controversial drivel but manage to get a lot of hits since people can’t wait to tell the blogger how stupid they are.
BRING BACK THE OLD HOMEPAGE!!!!!!!
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