So the observant reader might be wondering what's up with that bar of boxes just beneath the masthead. (err, on the main page, not if you're looking through individual articles)

It's a new way to navigate and visualize the page! In a nutshell, each rectangle is one story on this page. The first (leftmost) one symbolizes the top story on the page. The color of the box is the same as the header color, which indicates whether the story is less than 24 hours old, between 24 and 48 hours old, or older than 48 hours.

Clicking on the bar will jump you to that story in the page. This is intended to make it easier for people who come once a day. They can just click on the last dark-blue bar and jump to that article, and can scroll their way up after that.

Similarly, and possibly even more useful, the little circles at the right end of the boxes indicate whether that article has any user comments, and if so, how old the most recent user comment is. that way you don't have to remember how many comments there were or, worse yet, keep checking comments to see if there are any new ones. Just look for the blue circles for recent comments. Depending on how late I stay up tonight, clicking right in the little circle may also pop up the comments window directly.

I'd love to hear what you think of the functionality and implementation, and whether you'll use it in practice.

Happy Monday!

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Response to feedback: Making it more intuitive - One of my earlier designs called for summing up each post into a word and putting that single word in the post's box. I decided against it because it's too visually distracting (and because I dislike changing the database schema every time I make an interface tweak) but I might give it a try. I could have it in grey, turning to black on the rollover. This would also provice a convenient solution to issue #2:

Anchor tags aren't working in Netscape/Opera/Lynx - Yeah, they use the onclick property of the TD tag, and a lot of browsers can't deal. I'd use a transparent gif with an A tag, but I can't make it stretch correctly. As long as the comment box is sometimes there, stretching it to a percentage will either result in nonclicable box areas or comment boxes that wrap to the next line, both of which are worse. The other problem is that there's no affordance of clickability, since the cursor only changes to the finger when you're over the comments button. Lastly, clicking on comments brings up the comments and drops you to the post, which I'll cop out and say is a feature, not a bug, but if you're just catching up on comments, you probably don't want to scroll to the top every time you want to check out another post's new comments.

It won't make sense after this post falls from the top - I just added a "?" at the end, which links to this post. Let's all just smile and ignore for a second that the bar only appears on the home page, and the explanatory post comes up on a page that doesn't even have the bar it's trying to explain. I have an answer for that, but it's part of the Fury 4.0 redesign (oooh Fury four-point-oh... Okay, so it's just me), so it'll have to wait.

Length mapping makes some boxes too short - Fixed. I added a 'minimum size' buffer, so the really short posts don't look as short. This is actually more accurate because originally it used the number of bytes in the body to compute the %, but it didn't factor in the real estate of the title and the box, comment link, and all that. Now things won't get super crowded unless you have your window pretty narrow and I make a lot of posts in a week.

One more question: Does this bar just make sense for the home page, or would it be useful on the topic and date pages as well?