Much improved! http://elzr.com/reader It’s really getting fun now! Now you can really read the whole magazine in a single page! Plus: columns, much better design (section separators!), and… flags!
It’s still a very early release
(the columning in particular will be much improved soon) so please be gentle and let me know what you think of all the changes. What do you like? What’s helpful? What would you like to see?
Note that there are some weird bugs in Safari, to be fixed later. And all bets are off on what will happen in IE, I don’t have a machine to try it in for the moment.
See the project’s history at
http://elzr.com/posts/reader-economist
The page is pretty heavy, ~250k, but it still loads up in in seconds. It’s still much less than
The Economist’s current front page, which overloaded as it is with flash ads, weighs a whopping 4MB!
An experiment in improving the reading interface of the world’s best news magazine. Very early days. Check it out at elzr.com/reader.
Right now it’s just a glorified table of contents but even that I think helpful. It includes the abstract of every article or it’s first line
—in my experience The Economist’s pithy, playful titles can be under-descriptive. And there are also
backbars behind every title, giving you an ambient, non-verbal hint to the article’s size. Both features are there to fix something that got lost in the transition from print to web.
I’ve read The Economist for many years now, almost since the beginning from the web (I subscribed for a year when it was behind a paywall, the only time I’ve paid for content). And almost as long, I’ve been struggling with it’s interface. I guess it’s not that bad for casual readers, but for longtime junkies it can be much improved. Which is what I’ll try to do in the coming days.
Changelog:
.3 version, 16 June 2009:
BIG changes. See
http://elzr.com/posts/03-release-of-the-economist-reader for full details. Read the
whole magazine in a single page, columns, much better design
(sections separators!), and… flags!
.12 version, 14 June 2009: Fixed
.11 version, 13 June 2009: Prettier version.
.1 version, 8 June 2009: Kicking it off.
