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Welcome to the new Opera Watch

I am proud to unveil the new home for Opera Watch.

With the new design and layout, you will find our content more readable and structured. There are numerous new changes that have been made with the new site, some more apparent than others. As with any change, it takes time to get used to a new look and feel.

This has been a big step, and there is more to come. In the coming weeks and months I hope to roll out more features on Opera Watch. Just to give you a sneak. Opera Watch will conduct a monthly interview with Opera executives and officials, where our readers will have a chance to submit the questions.

Starting soon, I will have other writers and columnist join me to provide a more complete coverage of the latest buzz and news on the Opera browser.

Here at Opera Watch we will continue to strive in bring you the best and most comprehensive coverage on the Opera browser. More than 20,000 readers read our articles on the old site each month.

Opera Watch was first to break several Opera stories over the past year and has been featured in the press on countless occasions including The Inquirer, CBS Market Watch, Red Herring Magazine, InternetNews.com, Slashdot, Investors Business Daily, Neowin, and more.

I’d be lying if I said that I’m not proud of Opera Watch’s success. There is no better reward for me when I see people write comments and link to Opera Watch in their own blogs — I read every comment and generally visit the blogs/sites that link to Opera Watch. Thanks to everyone who has commented on Opera Watch.

There are still some bugs to squash and some changes to be made; your feedback is very important. (If there are any Wordpress users out there, I still can’t figure out how to properly word wrap the posts).

Over the past 4-5 months I’ve been working nights and weekend on this new site. And while I did put in a lot of work myself, it couldn’t have been done without the advice and help from a friend who wanted to remain anonymous. His input on style and layout has been immense. Thanks EC.

Also deserving credit is Dhaivat Maharaja, who worked on the graphics for the site.

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41 Comments

  1. 1 Sairam Nagulapalli

    May I be the first to congratulate you.

  2. 2 Petter Nilsen

    Congrats on the new site, it looks nice. It doesn’t validate with w3c, though :-)

  3. 3 mihau

    congrats… keep up the good work!

    i dont like the new design though ;)

  4. 4 Daniel Goldman

    Petter, it’s a work in progress.

  5. 5 babox

    congrats!!!

  6. 6 Arnt

    Congratulation!
    Look promising.

  7. 7 Eddie

    Great look. Congrats on the move, I appreciate all the hard work at Opera watch.

  8. 8 EC

    Ignore the “using …” - Congratulations on the new site launch!!!

    Waiting for more in the future….

  9. 9 Aaron

    Love the new design, very professional.

  10. 10 Jeena Paradies

    It looks much better than the old site, great work and thanks for all the news!

  11. 11 Matt

    As always Opera Watch is a great site.
    Plus, I just wanted to boost the Linux numbers :P

  12. 12 FataL

    Wow! Good lookin’! Congrats!
    I like “using” sing… :D
    As for IRC poll - I miss “I just don’t use any IRC”… But I will try - promise! ;)

  13. 13 Abhishek

    Great design/ very readable/ great colours and love the favicon.

    Keep it up.

  14. 14 Pallab De

    The interface certainly looks nice. But there is a small blank space above the header. If you remove that it will probably look better.

  15. 15 Saito

    Congratulations, Daniel, for the new OperaWatch.
    This comment’s live preview is new to me!

  16. 16 Petr Stříbný

    Last design on blogspot.com was very nice. This new design looks as bad joke for me.

    But content is perferct.

  17. 17 lakeview

    Congrtulations!

    Operawatch has been giving me many news about opera, which are very interesting to a opera fan. Thanks for hard working.

    Seems to me the header of the site is too dark.

  18. 18 Ankur

    Lovely
    :-)

  19. 19 breun

    Nice work, Daniel.

  20. 20 Ivan Minic

    Nice job with new website Daniel ;)

  21. 21 pholie

    Nice looking.
    Btw. the browsers and OS icons here in comments are good idea :)

  22. 22 ROBO Design

    Very good. I like the site. Much better than the previous.

  23. 23 karaj

    Congratulation!
    Your new site looks quite good.
    Keep feeding us with Opera news :)

  24. 24 kL

    About the design: Can you make Opera version + OS less standing out? Icon for OS should be alone, you don’t need word Opera next to icon (we’ll all know! :D) and both these could be floated right.

  25. 25 evane

    whooo! nice new site!
    And I really like how the comments note the browser and OS used :D
    How do you do it~~~ (I use wordpress too)

  26. 26 Daniel Goldman

    Thanks all for the kind words.

    I still have many touch-ups to do, so perhaps we can call this a beta site.

  27. 27 Charlie

    Congrats! I like the new design!

  28. 28 Kelson

    Congrats on the site!

    As for WordPress and word wrap… it looks OK, at least on this post. what is it that you’re having trouble with? At least with the default setup, it will convert returns to line breaks, double-returns to paragraphs, and if you just type without hitting enter, it’ll wrap it normally. (Assuming you’re using the plain posting interface, anyway.)

    If you want to justify the text, that’s done in the CSS file for the theme you’re using. Look for a .post {...} section and add text-align: justify; line between the curly braces. You could do th same thing for comments by editing the .comments {...} section.

  29. 29 Daniel Goldman

    Kelson, the posts that are up now are all fine. However, during my tests, I have encountered this problem, where the line overflows and creates a long horizontal scrollbar.

    It appears to me that wordpress thinks the whole line is one word, with no spaces. If I double click on a word in the editor, it’s supposed to select only that word. However, if I click on a word in the long line, many words get selected.

  30. 30 Charlie

    Completely off-topic… I can’t believe there are only four of us using Opera 8.54! I didn’t think so many people would hop on to a beta!

  31. 31 Bryan "d3bruts1d" McDaniel

    Looks good Daniel!

  32. 32 Kamalesh

    Great work, Daniel! Thanks for a great Opera blog to get the latest on a great browser and the team developing it…

    (Nice layout/graphics by EC and Dhalvat, as well.)

    Wow, cool live comment preview and auto-gen browser/OS info, too…

  33. 33 Kelson

    Daniel: is that on the WYSIWYG editor, or the plain-text editor? I know the plain-text editor has some problems, at least in Firefox, where the text area keeps snapping back to th left edge when I scroll it to view long URLs, but I’ve found the WYSYWIG editor annoying enough that I disabled it pretty quickly.

    Or was it on the actual post/preview page?

  34. 34 Daniel Goldman

    Kelson, it happened with the WYSIWYG editor. The problem wasn’t with long urls, it was just with plain words. Every so often, wordpress would recognize a bunch of words in a sentance as one word without any spaces.

  35. 35 Kelson

    Looks like it’s a bug in either TinyMCE (the editor that WordPress uses for WYSIWYG posting) or Opera 9’s support for designMode. I was able to reproduce the problem at TinyMCE’s example page. It looks like either TinyMCE or designMode is set so that if you type two spaces in a row, the second one is done as   (a non-breaking space) instead of a plain space. This would be so that you can do things like insert two spaces after a period and get the proper spacing.

    As near as I can tell, what’s happening is that the Opera/TinyMCE combination is instead using a   any time there are two “spaces” in a row—and it’s counting line breaks. So if you start typing at the end of the text area, it’s fine, but if you go back and start typing at the end of a line, all the spaces get inserted incorrectly. There’s only one flaw in this theory, and that’s the fact that if I enable the WYSIWYG editor on my own site, the bug doesn’t follow this pattern.

    I know support for Opera in TinyMCE is new, since it relies on designMode, which is new in Opera 9. So I don’t know whether it’s a flaw in Opera’s implementation of designMode, or a flaw in the way TinyMCE interacts with Opera.

    I did look at the JavaScript code for the version of TinyMCE that’s included in WordPress, and I found what looks like a disabled workaround for a similar problem in Gecko on line 967 of /wp-includes/js/tinymce/tiny_mce.js — but re-enabling it and setting it to check isOpera instead of isGecko didn’t have any effect on the problem.

    (Personally, I disabled the WYSIWYG editor shortly after upgrading to WordPress 2.0 because I didn’t like the code it generated. That, and I’m so used to HTML that typing the code was faster than trying to use the toolbar.)

  36. 36 Medina

    Am I late again?

  37. 37 jamie

    nice one, the new design looks great :)

  38. 38 Daniel Goldman

    Kelson, Thanks for looking into the problem. I’ll take a look at the nbsp issue.

    Also, I’m not sure it was an Opera problem. I think I also had it with IE.

  39. 39 Ramunas

    Nice new look. Keep it up. :)

  40. 40 mollusca

    Awesome! How about more frequent posts ;)

  41. 41 Tzach

    How come there are no IE explorer users commentators?!