As you may have noticed already, we’ve made some layout changes to the way the homepage now works on the site. By default (the key word there being “default”), it now no longer lists out the full text of all articles, instead providing a short extract followed by a click through to read the full article.
We thought long and hard about whether to make this change, as traditionally we’ve always outputted the full article. There’s a couple of reasons why ultimately we decided to make the change though, which I thought it was probably important to share.
Firstly, we’ve actually had a lot of requests for it. In part this seems to be because more and more people are reading LR on mobile devices. That’s great, and indeed we actually designed the site to be responsive and work well on those environments. One problem with the original layout, though, was that with all the text and images on there, the homepage could rack up a huge file-size, making it very slow to load on some devices. This was also proving a problem for people on older machines or slower connections.
Secondly, whilst we like writing (and reading) long form articles about lots of diverse topics, we accept that not everyone shares the same desire to spend their time reading 2000 word pieces on the state of London’s Freight network, or on early twentieth century bus trials! Hopefully, this layout will make it easier for those people who want to be a bit more targeted in their reading to enjoy LR without having to physically abuse their mouse wheel.
Now obviously we didn’t want to do away with the traditional layout completely (not least because its the one I still use), so you’ll now find that just as much as the site has an “Invert” option at the top of the page (which about 30% of you use, by the way) it now has a “Toggle Full Posts” option as well.
So, if like me you prefer the traditional layout, then just hit that and your browser should remember to show full posts on the homepage instead, just as it used to. Simples (in theory at least).
Suggestions and Changes
Do let us know what you think about this change in the comments – especially if you find its not working quite right for you in your browser or on your device of choice. That way we can fix it.
Similarly, if you’ve any other suggestions (or questions) feel free to post them in the comments as well. We love writing LR, and we hope you enjoy reading it – and the more we can make it a pleasant reading experience for you the better!
All the best and thanks, as always, for reading and commenting.
John Bull
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