Meet the new Shacknews in a video tour

Hello, World

Good, it looks like this thing is working. Welcome all to the new Shacknews! Yes, as your first look already told you, we've given the place a massive overhaul. When we started talking about redesigning the Shack, we decided to go all the way and not just slap a new coat of paint on things. The changes you see--and those you don't behind the scenes--throughout the site reflect months of work toward the goal of creating a better Shacknews experience.

Clearly, the front page is a departure from the blog format of old. We absolutely intend to continue reporting the video game news of the day as our core content. And we have a revised news page for that as well if you prefer the traditional "river" view. The new Shacknews home page comes at things a little differently. The visual approach gives us an easy way to quickly present the best stories of the moment. It results in a page you can quickly scan to see what stories you might want to check out right away.

We also wanted to better support the community that forms the heart and soul of the Shack. That starts with a new and improved chatty. It now runs on a 24-hour cycle, meaning you'll never again get cutoff by the Morning Discussion or Evening Reading reset. We also bring in headlines from our news stories as a new root post. This puts the conversation for a story in one place and makes it easy to sit on chatty and see everything that's going on as well.

It's an all new Shacknews underneath the hood as well. Not nearly as flashy, but maybe most important of all the upgrades, the end result should be a consistently responsive site. We also modernized many of the things you use everyday like the new screenshot viewer and video player.

Enough talking about it, we're eager for you to get in and see what we've been working on. We put together this brief video walkthrough as a quick way to get familiar with the lay of the land. Give it a look, play with the new site, and thanks for being part of the Shack. We know this is a bold change. It's also just the starting point. There's a lot still to do and we'll be closely watching all the suggestions and comments.