Lipstick; Meet Pig

Behold, The New Uptown Almanac

Uptown Almanac has been pretty quiet recently—and we do apologize for that—but it was for a fine reason.  Just look around; the blog is (should be?) a whole lot less painful to read and look at.  Finally.

It’s not just a redesign, but we’ve revamped the whole site, including:

  • An Improved Commenting System: We’ve overhauled our commenting platform and introduced the ability for San Francisco’s Best Commenters to upload photos and embed videos.  We’re looking forward to this feature being abused to exhaustion until we ultimately remove it.
  • You Can Now Read the Site on Your Phone: As much as you loved squinting to read the site while hiding from your boss in the bathroom, UA is now compatible with small screens.
  • High-Definition Photos: Our indescribably terrible cell pics will now look great better on devices with high-resolution displays.
  • New Blood: Okay, this isn’t site thing per-say, but we’re beefing up our roster of writers (with Jackson West of SFist/Valleywag/NBC/Gigaom fame joining us this week!).

But looking beyond all the internet doodads, the biggest change is we’re moving away from our old blog format.  Over all the years of running this site, we’ve felt that there have been a lot of pieces of news that was important to the conversation, but we didn’t have more to add to what was already reported. So borrowing from blogs and sites like The Awl, Eater, and Tumblr, we’ll be rolling out a series of new post formats that’ll enable us to point you to stories happening elsewhere without wasting time regurgitating other people’s reporting.

Now, it’s worth pointing out there’s still a lot of problems and things left out of this refresh—we still don’t have a footer, author bios are busted, and we’ve wanted to retire our dated slogan for ages.  But these problems aren’t for a lack of proofreading, but rather, we wanted to get what we have up and get back to blogging.  So please consider this our first draft, and please let us know if you have any ideas for how to make UA even better.

Comments (32)

Broken image

broken Jackson West link

Thanks for the heads up!

Nice work

this is way way better.  +1

Good to see fake scum is back.

1000% more hipster

do we like the black borders?

Yeah, the jury is still out on those. (I like them, but the feedback has been pretty mixed.)

Into the black borders.

I hear you. New logo’s pretty sick though.

like

Pretty sweet overhaul, though the Featured Content section looks a bit busy. Maybe that’s just because there’s a lot of text on text action.

I approve, nonetheless, allthemore.

I could just be missing something, but is there a way to create user profiles for regular posters?

I think it might be time to change the tagline, “San Francisco: Where 20-somethings go to retire”

It hasn’t been that since I arrived in the bay area for college in 2003, I assume the last time was in the early 90s when it was reasonably affordable.  But especially now thats false.  Without getting into a Portland discussion, it seems pretty clear that Portland has assumed that title.

Agreed.  As pointed out in the piece itself, I’ve been finding the tagline increasingly dated over the last two years, but I haven’t come up with anything better (yet).

a nod to kurdt cobain (first verse on the first track for In Utero):  Teenage angst has paid off well / Now I’m bored and old  

Yes, please. The tag line has got to go. I’d never ntoiced it before, but when I just loaded the new web page, I almost decided I shouldn’t read the blog any more because I’m 30.

Ironically, SF is still a place for 20-somethings to retire, but mostly because their for-profit startup has gone public or been bought up.

I like it overall but I find the red links very distracting. It’s difficult to focus with such bright links constantly competing for my attention.

Cant wait to use this feature for real.  

I have mixed feelings about the grey background, but it should make it easier to read in a dimly lit bar, not to mention the next morning when you’re hungover.

Hmm, Firefox on a mac seems to drop the style sheets. Looks like a page from 1997 on Mosaic. Also, what happened to the “I don’t think before I type” prefill for the name? That was sustainably hillarious.

Working fine for me on Firefox 27.0.1 on Mavericks.  You might try bypassing your local cache with Command-Shift-R.

Kevin:

All of the individuals who were involved in this update are to be commended. Very readable and concise.

Shout out to all of the techies that spend their time building the Drupal platform.

this blog is getting too gentrified

Nice work KevMo. God bless technology. You little techie you!

Would be nice to be able to navigate to next/previous posts without having to use the back button. As it is, the home page is the only place from which you can access additional content.

it looks great! i even like the borders!

Would be nice to be able to navigate to next/previous posts without having to use the back button. As it is, the home page is the only place from which you can access additional content.

Top team of hater.  no that isn’t the right slogan.  The old won was better.

This new format is too gentrified.   Hardly any chance for blood and guts.  The good stuff and often been in the comments, and  there is not even 140 characters at the top to preview the comments.

I’m not saying go back to the old format, but ask the people who don’t like this, rather than the yes, sir crowd.