After two months in the making, the new design and features are finally here! Go ahead and take a look around, try out some of the new/improved features, and let us know what you think! But first, if things aren’t looking quite right, you need to clear your cache so that your browser will download our new style-sheets. Do this by holding down the shift key and clicking the reload button, or by pressing Ctrl+F5 (this shouldn’t be necessary, but just in case).
The first thing you’ll notice is that the site looks different! We were going for an updated look, and a brighter design. For the CyberNet “old-timers” who have been around for a while, you probably remember our very first design (pictured below) that was blue and orange. We’ve decided to go back to our roots and brought back the orange! You’ll also notice that we went back to the fixed width, and a wide one-column sidebar.
This was our first time creating our own theme from scratch, and boy, was it a lot of work! We sure learned a lot in the process though, and hopefully it is a look that you’ll enjoy.
Overview
- Article Bar
- Thumbnail View
- User Management Screen
- Thumbnail Galleries
- “Add This” Social Bookmarking
- Contact/Send us a tip
- Commenting
- Edit your comments
- Unread comment tracking
- Multiple levels of comment tracking
- CyberMarks
- All-Stars
NEW FEATURES
- Article Bar: In just a few clicks you can pull up articles from today, yesterday, and the last 7 days of CyberNotes.
- Thumbnail View: When performing searches, browsing categories, or going through our archives, you’ll receive a much more condensed view of the results. This includes a small thumbnail of an image in the post, along with a summary.
- User Management Screen: This is for registered users only. This will be the location to track unread comments, manage CyberMarks, change your options/profile, and get an overview of site statistics.
- Thumbnail Galleries: (JavaScript must be enabled) Thumbnails now use Highslide to dynamically retrieve and display full-size versions. If you don’t have JavaScript enabled, you’ll still be able to click on the thumbnails and see the full-size version as you normally would. Use the left/right buttons on the keyboard, or the buttons on screen to navigate through multiple images on an article. This will also work for most prior postings as well.
Add This: Have a favorite social bookmarking site? Use the icon pictured to the right to bookmark any of our articles with your favorite services like Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Digg, Furl, Reddit, and more…
IMPROVED FEATURES
- Contact/Send us a tip: When sending us a tip, you’ll now be able to enter in both your own site’s URL and the URL of the item you’re submitting.
A new bookmarklet is available which will automatically fill in the article URL of the site that you’re on, and it will set the subject to the title of the site. If you’re logged into our site, it will also fill in your name, your site, and your email address. Sending a tip has never been so easy.
Just drag the CyberNet Tips bookmarklet into your bookmarks and then click it anytime you want to easily send us a tip.
- Commenting: The commenting system has been completely overhauled and customized! In case you come across a spam comment before we do, there is now a “report a comment” feature to report the item. This has proved to be very useful in our forum, and there is no doubt that it will be useful here as well!
- Edit Your Comments(registered users only): Just like before, you’ll have 15 minutes to edit your comments. Now you edit the comment on the same page as where you left the comment which makes using the quote feature a lot easier.
- Unread Comment Tracking (registered users only): This was available previously, but it is way more optimized now. This was a bottleneck for registered users before that could cause the site to load slow. We’ve spent many hours re-working the system so that it does as little work as possible.
We had the comment tracking capabilities before, but the problem was that they were cookie based. That meant that if you cleared your browser’s cookies or were using a different browser, you wouldn’t have access to comments you haven’t read on the site. No more! If you opt-in to our unread comments server on the management page, we’ll keep tabs on the comments you haven’t read! Enabling this feature can be done on the options screen located on the management page.
Multiple Levels of Comment Tracking: There are several options for how you want to track your comments. You can either track all unread comments, or you can filter out posts to track only the ones that you’ve commented on. You can also disable comments from being tracked on a specific post via the management page, or you can track only the articles that you choose to monitor via the “tracks” icon at the footer of each article.
If the “tracks” icon is grey, it means that the comments for that article are not being tracked. If it is green, comments are being tracked.
- CyberMarks: CyberMarks is our bookmarking system that has been completely rewritten and optimized for performance. It still uses AJAX, so bookmarking an article is never a hassle.
Now you can bookmark and delete a CyberMark all on the article page via the “bookmark” icon. By default, the icon is blue which signifies that the article has NOT been bookmarked with the CyberMarks bookmarking system. If you decide to bookmark the article, just click the logo and it will change to green to signify that it has been bookmarked.On the management screen for your CyberMarks, you can sort them by the article title, bookmarked date, or article posting date. You can also dynamically choose how many CyberMarks are displayed on the screen at one time.
Search your CyberMarks! Performing a search looks at both the title and content of the posts you’ve bookmarked. This makes it even easier to find your favorite posts on our site, and gives you a bookmark searching capability that you can’t get with any other site.
Delete you CyberMarks! On the management screen, you can delete your CyberMarks. The process uses AJAX which makes the management process even faster.
View the top five most CyberMarked articles in the sidebar.
- All-Stars: You’ll notice that we now have our active All-Stars listed in the footer on all CyberNet pages. All-Stars are readers who’ve frequently contributed to the site with commenting and/or submitting tips to the editors. We wanted to reward these frequent commenters, and this is the best way we know how! You can become an All-Star after you’ve accumulated 125 stars. You’ll receive one star for each comment, and you’ll receive between 1–5 stars for each tip you submit that we write about.
Wrapping it up
It may not seem like two months worth of work, but between writing for the site and developing at the same time, it’s been a long two months of working day and night, along with weekends to get this all done. Almost every single feature on our site has been developed by us at the request of one of you.
We look forward to your feedback. We’ve spent some time testing all of the features to make sure that they work, but you may come across a bug here or there. If you do, please be sure to let us know so we can get it fixed right away.
A big THANK YOU to those who looked over the very early mock-ups of this design to provide valuable feedback, and a big thank-you to EVERYBODY who contributes to this site as readers and commenters! 
Looks Awesome! When you showed us what the colors were last week I wasn’t too sure about the orange, but I think the combination of the orange with the red looks great! It looks like a lot of work went into this. Well done!
Very nice, it is going to take some getting used. I love the layout and the flashy stuff.
Ryan & Ashley, you did a fantastic job! Lots of attention to detail. Your hard work has definitely paid off!
Thanks guys, those are the types of comments we were looking to hear! If you notice any bugs be sure to point them out because we really want to get this thing perfected.
Congratulations! The site looks great!
Wow, lots of new features for me to play around with! I like the new look.
Great job. I really like the new site.
motang wrote:
you took the words out of my mouth. Have to get used to the orange, but great work nonetheless. Looking for further innovations in the future.
Wow…
This looks awesome! Great job Ryan
Yep, this is great. Most of all I love that this site have the surfers/readers/visitors in mind. Keep it like that.
Nice work guys. It’ll take a bit for the new look/feel to sink in but for starters I really like the ‘Popular’ bar at the top & the bookmarklets popup. I’m glad the commenting system hasn’t been changed drastically coz it was something I always liked about this site.
wow…nice “pimp your site”. hehe But i think the fonts are to big..or just me feel it..:lol:
anyway..it is nice..keep it up Cybernet
Great job guys! I was a little worried about the colors when you first showed them as well, however, it works really well.
Now take a day or two off, you deserve it!
Amazing new look and very much worth the wait
Looks nice but the font style, I no like
Looks great and I love the new features. Great work!
Awesome work! I really like the new layout!
Very pleasant remake!
Will be spending more time here now (usually more through RSS feed).
Just when I was getting comfy to the look, things change. Why does change happen? Change for change sake? To feel fresh? Relevant? I’m sure a lot of work was involved, and I don’t like to be a bad apple among the glowing comments, but I don’t like the redesign.
So many things in life always change for no real reason.
Yeah, sure!! Features!! The features!! But it’s like Microsoft’s Word. Do we really need SQL backend multiplexing sharepoint VBS C# scripting in Word? No. Does the site really need all this stuff? It’s so busy.
I love the direction you’ve taken with the site! My only comment would be that, like others have mentioned, the font style seems very odd and out of place. The “fun font” doesn’t match the bold and modern styling of the new site. Other than that, I like it!
I like it. Well done!
new layout looks great! ^_^ the only thing i think you guys need to do now is have some sort of logo competition or hire someone to make a new cybernet logo. the old one was bad but bearable, and the new one is even worse >_
Looking good. I’m actually also working on a new design for my blog.
I really like your housecleaning and site upgrade. It’s great. Some have commented on the logo. I think it belies the changes that lie beneath it and hides the surprises within. Keep it or change it – it’s your site.
Hey guys!
GREAT job on the site! The layout, the colors, the features, they’re all great. Of course, you won’t be able to please everyone… and if you do, let us all in on the secret!!
Only question I have is regarding Live Titles. When the site changed, my Live Title bookmark changed to display “e9 = new Object();” and some more JavaScript. I deleted the bookmark and remade it, only to realize that the Live Title is gone. You guys stop supporting this feature?
Otherwise, great!! Keep up the great work!
We had forgotten to put those back in, but they’ll be up by the end of next week. Thanks for the reminder
i knew this was coming, but when i open firefox today, and had an article of urs opened from my last session, i didn’t recognize the site, and wondered where did i go
and now for some comments:
1. gr8 job
2. where did the calender gone? i also saw it didn’t have many dates lately, but i loved it.
3. how can i add a link to words in the comments? you had this before.
4. i think the multilingual support is gone – I’ve pinged this article from my blog, but now my trackback is in gibrish. i tried different encoding, but no luck.
[tech.cybernetnews.com]
5. could you consider having the cybermarks also divided according to the tags/categories you used to post them? so i can click a subject, and see all my cybermarks which belongs to it.
6 Awesome work.
Jack.
Looks pretty neat, but a bit slow on my 256k connection. The sidebar and footer looks really awesome
@Jack:
1) THANKS!
2) The calendar was quite a bottleneck on the site when it came to loading. It was constantly grabbing the contents of the Google Calendar, and we actually received complaints about how it worked. We might bring it back in some form, but definitely not the same way.
3) Those buttons confused people more than they helped them. We wanted to keep things a little simple so we removed those buttons. You can still hyperlink words by wrapping an HTML hyperlink tag around it manually, but the easiest way is to just paste the URL in the comment. Our system will automatically hyperlink URL’s that you paste in.
4) I’m not quite sure what you mean by the multilingual support being gone. We’ve got the different language buttons in the footer of the page now if that’s what you’re looking for.
5) I thought about that, but we have over 1000 different tags that we have used to classify articles. That would make for a very long list of tags to choose from!
6) Thanks again!!
i like it
I’m liking this new theme – far better than the last one which felt chunky and a bit old style. One suggestion – decrease the size of the bar with the bookmark and track options – it’s as chunky as the header of a post and not as important (nor does it need to be big as it’s using images). Thumbnail view doesn’t need that bar at all, this will make it even quicker to browse for the right article and reduce clutter. You did yourself a disservice by posting a pic with the double right-hand sidebar, that was one of the silliest things on the site and the old theme looked much more sensible without it. But this one seems to have improved even more so its all good.
We thought about reducing the size of that bar, but we did review such options. Opinions that we got said that small icons would make it less noticeable to new users, and we wanted to spark some curiosity for those people who don’t know what the buttons are for.
We had a feeling that there would be some people who didn’t like it, but if we make it prominent it will be a reminder to our visitors to make use of the features.
Ryan wrote:
3) the buttons confused ppl, and using HTML tags did not? now thats funny
4) if u look at the trackback text (below the comments) that appears for the link i posted, you could see that only the letters in English appears correctly (at least for me). you see “the glass is half” and from both sides of it there is Gibrrish. it wasn’t the case before, where you could see the title i gave to my post, in Hebrew.
hopes that clarify this.
Ryan, the new website look is incredibly good!
It seems to me, it was hard job, but it was really worth. 
Ryan wrote:
Not to harp on, but for readability purposes you could change the icons into longer icons (with a fixed width this wouldn’t be a problem) that fill the bar from left to right but aren’t as tall. They would still be highly noticeable, but also wouldn’t extend the article more than necessary.
Another thing – in your RSS feed there’s always a link at the bottom of an article with “Read more and comment” then a link to the article. Thing is, the format of an RSS feed defines the article link in the top, and this is picked up by the feed reader. So having that there is just a bit of unecessary clutter. Especially as there’s another ‘Add a comment’ link at the bottom under the related posts.
We put that link there because our feed is inappropriately used on hundreds of different sites, so that link is a sign to people reading the article on other sites that we are the ones who are producing the content.
Ryan wrote:
Ah, fair play then, it’s always annoying when someone else steals your content and I guess when that’s your day’s work it gets even more irritating.
Well
I didnt see my post in here.. since mY name is Ryan too and I dont want miss on thanking you guys on doing wonderful job..
Thanks a ton!
I am new here. Worthy! I don’t regret! Keep on such a good job!
Regards from France
Wow, compared to now, the old skin really looks dated.
It is funny to look back on it from time to time. We still have a hard time believing how far we have come.
Hey Ryan it’s interesting to read your articles.. thanks
thanks , For You It`s Very Nice Job
nice nice, now How come my “browzer” defender is giving me a warning about this site?
The new skin is really a big improvement. Much better than the old skin. Good work.
Thanks good text
nice nice, now How come my “browzer” defender is giving me a warning about this site?
Thanks good text
Ryan It is really funny to look back on it from time to time. We still have a hard time believing how far we have come.