My overall review is, seems fine, some pros and some cons, mostly looks/feels the same to me. Some details;
I had also started feeling like the stuff between the title and the start of the post content was cluttered.
I think my biggest current annoyance is the TOC on the left sidebar. This has actually disappeared for me, and I don’t see it on hover-over, which I assume is maybe just a firefox bug or something. But even before this update, I didn’t like the TOC. Specifically, you guys had made it so that there was spacing between the sections that was supposed to be proportional to the length of each section. This never felt like it worked for me (I could speculate on why if you’re interested). I’d much prefer if the TOC was just a normal outline-type thing (which it was in a previous iteration).
I think I’ll also miss the word count. I use it quite frequently (usually after going onto the post page itself, so the preview card wouldn’t help much). Having the TOC progress bar thing never felt like it worked either. I agree with Neel that it’d be fine to have the word count in the date hover-over, if you want to have less stuff on the page.
The tags at the top right are now just bare words, which I think looks funny. Over the years you guys have often seemed to prefer really naked minimalist stuff. In this case I think the tags kinda look like they might be site-wide menus, or something. I think it’s better to have the tiny box drawn around each tag as a visual cue.
The author name is now in a sans-serif font, which looks pretty off to me in between the title and the text as serif fonts. It looks like when the browser failed to load the site font and falls back onto the default font, or something. (I do see that it matches the fact that usernames in the comments are sans serif, though.)
I initially disliked the karma section being so suppressed, but then I read one of your comments in this thread explaining your reasoning behind that, and now I agree it’s good.
I also use the comment count/link to jump to comments fairly often, and agree that having that in the lower left is fine.
My overall review is, seems fine, some pros and some cons, mostly looks/feels the same to me. Some details;
I had also started feeling like the stuff between the title and the start of the post content was cluttered.
I think my biggest current annoyance is the TOC on the left sidebar. This has actually disappeared for me, and I don’t see it on hover-over, which I assume is maybe just a firefox bug or something. But even before this update, I didn’t like the TOC. Specifically, you guys had made it so that there was spacing between the sections that was supposed to be proportional to the length of each section. This never felt like it worked for me (I could speculate on why if you’re interested). I’d much prefer if the TOC was just a normal outline-type thing (which it was in a previous iteration).
I think I’ll also miss the word count. I use it quite frequently (usually after going onto the post page itself, so the preview card wouldn’t help much). Having the TOC progress bar thing never felt like it worked either. I agree with Neel that it’d be fine to have the word count in the date hover-over, if you want to have less stuff on the page.
The tags at the top right are now just bare words, which I think looks funny. Over the years you guys have often seemed to prefer really naked minimalist stuff. In this case I think the tags kinda look like they might be site-wide menus, or something. I think it’s better to have the tiny box drawn around each tag as a visual cue.
The author name is now in a sans-serif font, which looks pretty off to me in between the title and the text as serif fonts. It looks like when the browser failed to load the site font and falls back onto the default font, or something. (I do see that it matches the fact that usernames in the comments are sans serif, though.)
I initially disliked the karma section being so suppressed, but then I read one of your comments in this thread explaining your reasoning behind that, and now I agree it’s good.
I also use the comment count/link to jump to comments fairly often, and agree that having that in the lower left is fine.