After seven months of frustration and irritation, the new Freethought Blogs is finally here. As you have certainly noticed by now, we have not only a new design and logo but a whole new theme and even a new server with a different hosting company. The front page is completely different and should be much more useful to those of you with an interest in specific issues, as it will curate posts across the network by topic. Three years to the day after the launch of the network, it’s a whole new FTB. A few notes:
Huge thanks to our site tech, Alex Songe. After the company we hired to do the redesign turned out to be completely incompetent, he rewrote damn near the entire thing to make it functional. He’s worked his ass off on this and there’s no way we could have done it without him.
Also a huge thanks to Matthew Pickard, a longtime FTB reader and brilliant graphic designer. He designed the new logo without charging us a dime and I really love the look. The idea of the handprint goes back to the paleolithic paintings on cave walls at Lascaux, France. There was a small minority who demanded a picture of a tentacle (I’ll leave it to your imagination to discern where that came from), but their brief insurgency was put down.
There will inevitably be things that will need to be tweaked over the next few days. If you’re having a problem with the site, please use the tech support form to send it to us. And be as specific as you can, include what OS and browser you’re using and get screenshots if possible so we can track down the problem. Your registrations should remain the same and be fully functional for you to comment. And please be patient while we track down those annoying little gremlins.
One new thing you may notice: We now have an Amazon storefront, the Freethought Shop. I’ll be adding books and DVDs and other items that I think our readers might like. If you link to Amazon from there to buy one of them, FTB will get a little kickback from Amazon. That’s just another way you can help support the network without costing you anything at all.
There are more changes coming as well. As soon as we’ve got all the little bugs fixed on the new design, we’ll be adding three new bloggers that I’m really excited about having here. And we’ll be moving forward on yet more new bloggers soon, as we’ve been in kind of a holding pattern for the last few months in that regard as we’ve worked on the redesign.
So welcome to the new FTB. Hope you like it.