You may have noticed that the front page of io9 looks a little . . . strange. We've just gotten a new look, and we've got tips on making it work for you.
First of all, if you totally hate the new look and never want to see it again, you can switch it off. In the io9 menu bar (pictured here, also at the top of the io9 front page), click the "condensed" button and select "expanded." That gives you the old view. Whew.
Now on to the "condensed" view, which is our new default.
Basically the philosophy behind our new design was simple: We wanted to make it easier for you to see all the articles we've published in the past 48 hours on the front page. One of the problems readers have with io9 is that we publish so many posts per day that they disappear off into that weird place you have to reach by clicking things at the bottom of the front page.
So our crack team of designers and techs came up with a more condensed design. Now our front page gives you headlines and sometimes pictures or a few words about each article. Hopefully, this will make it easier to scan through our stories each day. Think of the new front page as a table of contents, or the cover of a very long, very vertical magazine.
You can also customize the view you see by using the "display" button on that same menu bar above. You can choose to see only top stories (those are stories the editors pick as the most important), or stories that relate only to science or television. Put in web nerd terms: the display options simply take you to a tag page that contains only posts with the tag "movies" or "top" or whatever you've picked from the menu.
Finally, if you scoot your eyes all the way over to the right of the search box in the io9 menu bar, you'll see another menu option for viewing posts. It defaults to "most recent," but you can also switch the view to show posts that are most popular, or most discussed, over the past 24 hours.
Comments work the same way they always have, which is to say the same way they did when we changed them last.
No, I have no idea what the little flame thing next to each story means or why it sometimes looks orange and sometimes doesn't. Make up your own story about that and get back to me.
If you see any bugs, please report them to Nick.