For Iowa’s big night, I was the designer in charge of helping our two cover editors make the best cover-grids they could make and troubleshoot technical issues they’d run into. Turns out that I barely earned my free pizza that night because no matter what surprise political win or early candidate speech was thrown at the editors’ wire-feeds and TV screens, they were ready for it!

One editor focusing on the current cover and one anticipating the next move worked like a charm! Aside from a couple minor tweaks, I was just there to admire what I thought was impossible to achieve less than a year ago: cover editors making light-speed changes, big and small, to a visually complicated cover without the intervention of a designer. The media editor was also able to constantly switch to better photos as they were available. It was truly amazing to witness everyone in the newsroom pulling together to beat the competition and deliver up-to-the-minute coverage, and I think we did just that.

We've done quite a few updates to the site to make things load faster, look better, and be more helpful. We've added a home button, and improved the response of the fly-out navigation, among other things. View the full entry for the details.

Yes, I am invoking Al Green to try to spread a little peace, love, and understanding to everybody.

In case you get the impression otherwise, we are reading every single comment and e-mail that gets sent to us. We understand that a big change can cause confusion, unfamiliarity, and even contempt, but please know that we are taking every question and concern into consideration. If the comment you have left isn't showing up, it's not that it isn't being read or addressed, it's probably that it's something we already know about and are doing something about.

We have made quite a few adjustments and improvements to the site in the last several days based on your feedback and questions, and I'd like to mention a few in particular.

So, it turns out that more than a few of you are aware of the command+U key combination in your browser (for the non-geeks in the house, that’s a common keyboard shortcut for View Source). And a few of you have even noticed that, despite our efforts to write the best code possible, the HTML markup still leaves much to be desired. For instance, the site doesn’t validate with the W3C and, a far greater sin, doesn’t even bother to declare a DOCTYPE. How, some have asked, can we say that we care about standards when we are missing these fundamental pieces?

The short answer is that msnbc.com is eleven years old. We have thousands of legacy pages that date back to the time when Netscape 2 was the dominant browser in the marketplace. We’re working on solutions to get this content into our new, more flexible system, but if we’d waited to port everything over, we’d be declaring a DOCTYPE of HTML 6.0.

The longer answer is a bit more complicated. We could, of course, just leave legacy pages without a DOCTYPE and carry on, boldly into the future, but some pages (like stories) still use components that don’t expect a DOCTYPE and break the page rather horribly. We’re also having to reconfigure our CMS to support DOCTYPES properly - a task that’s actually more difficult than writing a line of markup at the top of the page. For instance, to be XHTML compliant, we have several dozen legacy bugs to fix to be considered valid XML. I’m personally lobbying for HTML 5, so, Safari 3 users, get ready.

Then there’s the classic problem of design and development disconnection. The site architecture actually supports having a DOCTYPE right now - I could pick one from a dropdown, hit republish and make the world a better place. In fact, when I first fired up TextMate to write the first draft of HTML that would eventually become the new site, I specifically chose HTML 4.01 Transitional. Why? Because it makes my job easier. Using a DOCTYPE makes bad browsers behave, at least a little bit. Not using a DOCTYPE has made life harder for all of us working on the site markup because it means we have to work around the various quirks of that perpetual thorn in my… side, Internet Explorer. But we ended up not designing with a DOCTYPE because we weren’t sure that feature was going to make the release and had to assume the worst in order to make our deadline. Declaring a DOCTYPE right now would actually break the site in some browsers because of these workarounds. Believe me when I say, I would’ve slept a lot more, and probably have at least a little bit more hair on my head, if <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> appeared at the top of our homepage.

Like anyone else who’s eyes haven’t glazed over by reading this far down, I’m a geek. I know it’s easy to fire off a quick blog post and become righteously indignant about these sorts of things (guilty). Again, I ask for your patience and understanding. We know what needs to be done, we actually do this stuff for a living (some of us for fun, as masochistic as that sounds). We’re working hard to deliver the very best site possible, inside and out, I promise.

This post was written by Newsvine user Jerry Firman (aka oldfogey)

It sure seems like I have spent the whole day writing, talking and thinking about MSNBC.com and its new Portal to Progress. This evening an associate asked me if I could write a comprehensive article about what Newsviners might think about this refurbished site. At first I was struck with pride at having been asked. On second thought I began to fear the return of my old nemesis; writer's block any time I was asked to produce a special item. On further reflection I began to realize I owed it to Newsviners to do my best to represent what I felt would be their views of the new site. Thinking even farther down the line I began to question why anyone would think that Newsviners would have a viewpoint that differed greatly from Joe/Jane Reader as they surfed along and came upon the site. There is a difference.

Friday was a great day for news images and multimedia on MSNBC.com. We launched a redesign that puts visuals – slide shows, audio slide shows, videos and Photoblog – front and center in the news we publish each day.

So, you may be wondering how to find your favorite features, like “The Week in Pictures” and “Space shots.” Or perhaps, how to find the latest slide show we’ve published. All of these are easier to find in our redesign.

Admit it. You saw our new homepage and it lived up to your wildest fantasies about online news presentation. Me, too. Okay, maybe—maybe—two, three people tops will say ‘what were they thinking?!’ Rest assured we were thinking. For about two years. Here’s how it started.

The gentle evolution



This is our existing design, just wider. And with a rotating video area in the top right. And collapsible links in the center. And icons. And time stamps. Nothing terribly exciting. User groups liked it. It felt safe. But they didn’t love it. Neither did we.

Not to be a stick in the mud, but when this blog launched a week in advance of our redesign rollout, I was wary of the idea. Why? Because when it comes to large, complex technology projects, the words "coming soon" may be the two most dangerous words in the English language.