I understand your frustration w.r.t. the designer.

I’m not sure I ever saw the Deki-based version during the preview phase. I probably wasn’t paying attention – sorry about that. The reason I have feedback now is that I just wrote a small extension and so was using devmo a lot. You’ll be pleased to know that I found almost everything I needed

We talked about line length during the design process, and finally decided to try the approach we took, opting in favor of reducing the need to scroll over reducing line length. We figured if people didn’t like that decision, they’d complain during the preview phase. Nobody did, so we left it alone.

Unfortunately, the contract with the skin designer is over now, so we’ll have to pay more money if we want him to redo this stuff, or we’ll have to do it ourselves. That’s a significant frustration for me in terms of the lack of feedback while he was still under contract. Oh well…

The header has been shrunk substantially since the earlier phases of the design. It’s actually only a little bit taller than the old MDC’s header, yet has more in it.

The issues you mention with search are known problems, and I’ve got tickets filed with MindTouch to clean up the search results.

I’m not aware of any preview mode at all, so I’m not sure what formatting you’d like cleaned up. Adding a preview feature is on our wish list.

I don’t think I have anything set up wrong with my blog, but if anyone knows what I should check, please let me know.

“I actually prefer a sidebar or other always-visible interface myself when editing a wiki. However, after lengthy discussions with a lot of people before the skinn design started, we all agreed to go with the drop-down menus for one simple reason: to maximize the amount of actual content that the reader can view at once.”

Actually, from a usability point of view, that argument doesn’t work. There’s a range of line length in characters which are most comfortable to read – somewhere between 80 and 120. (That’s one reason we resisted pressure in Bugzilla to make comments full-width.) So a sidebar can provide links while simultaneously improving the usability of the page by reducing its width.

Also, if this is the goal, shrink the big-ass header

My pet peeve – the search results return loads of content in languages I don’t speak, and the name contains the language code, which is ugly. Where can I set a pref for only English results? Update: Ah, found it. But some people might not even think to look…

And can the “preview” text be better formatted?

Lastly, I’m most unhappy with your blog software. I forgot to fill in the name/mail and hit submit. It moaned, and then when I pressed Back, my text was gone! I had to run LiveHTTPHeaders, reload the error to resubmit the post, extract the Post body and run it through a URL decoder to get my text back.

That doesn’t happen on all sites, so I’m pointing the figure at your copy of WordPress unless you can prove it’s Firefox 3.