Enough of your borax, poindexter, we need action -- take me to redditAll.com!The reddit front page is daunting to a number of casual Internet users, I know. But those blue verdana headlines won't be changing anytime soon (except on user-created reddits, where you can restyle all the CSS).
So redditall.com is a new take on the front page that looks more like popurls (Thomas Marban has done brilliantly on that btw) only with different blocks from different chunks of the reddit network.
First, some history (scroll past this for the pictures):
This idea started in a cracked (sorry, Jasc) copy of Paint Shop Pro 5 back in July 2005, shortly after Steve and I launched reddit.As for the site itself, here's an overview:
Connor, a college buddy of ours, and I were passing design ideas back and forth when we got to something that looked an awful lot like the 'web desktops' that were so hip at the time. You can see the early reddit mockups on my blog (formerly known as redditall.com, you can still read it all at reddit.blogspot.com).
It's been almost four years since that mockup and reddit has come a long way. In particular, we open-sourced and a bunch of developers got interested in messing around with reddit code. One redditor in particular, Ryan, did some great work in creating erqqvg, a real-time reddit.
Turns out he also had some spare cycles and I commissioned him to build RedditAll. He did a marvelous job.
Or if you hate videos...
Right across the top is a row of the hottest from pics (one of our most popular reddits)
In the top right, you'll find an easy way to search for and add blocks for a reddit you're interested in. The reddit community has grown tremendously since we allowed user-created reddits, so this is a good window into all the diversity.
The main layout is composed of blocks, which come in four different flavors. One of the defaults shows the hottest links on reddit from Wired.com (this way you can track the hottest reddit links from any domain you'd like).
And you can also create a block to display result of a reddit search. Not surprisingly, one of the defaults is a search for "bacon" on reddit. At the time of this screenshot it appears Wired.com has chosen a rather popular subject (see the #1 headline in both):
You can customize each block for whatever sort option you prefer. Here's the block for the hottest links from WTF.reddit, which we can switch to the most controversial links of WTF.reddit (because really, what does it take to be controversial on WTF.reddit?)
If tracking a particular reddit, search query, or domain wasn't enough, you can also create block for specific redditors.
And if you don't like their placement, that's fine, just drag them around until you've got a layout you like (and don't worry, there's a cookie keeping track of all this for when you come back).
Bonus! Click the link to live dangerously and customize for the option to change the theme, along with a few other things. I'm a space man myself.
Double bonus! Linger on redditAll.com long enough and you'll start to see momentum arrows to indicate if a link is currently shooting up the ranks or plummeting to its demise.
Oh, and those percentages are the link's current "grade" based on up and down votes.
As always, do let us know what you think of RedditAll.com.
