One of the things that’s always on our minds here at Webmonkey and Wired is the wired.com news stream. We produce a huge number of posts every day, and our curated front door only shows the crème de la crème. The rest gets dumped in a river, which is informative, but not that exciting to look at. So we see it as a challenge: how to keep it visually interesting and still show a good mix of stories, all with a minimal amount of fuss and busywork.
Tumblr is a good solution, and one that several other news organizations are using. I happened across the Scaffold theme, and I like how it organizes posts not on a strict grid, but on a fluid grid where elements fill in the gaps around each other. It looks like a Tetris board.
The secret sauce is jQuery Masonry, a plug-in for the popular library by David Desandro.
“Think of it as the flip side of CSS floats,” he writes. “Whereas floating arranges elements horizontally then vertically, Masonry arranges elements vertically then horizontally according to a grid. The result minimizes vertical gaps between elements of varying height, just like a mason fitting stones in a wall.”
You can grab the code from Desandro or check out the development version on GitHub. Just like jQuery, it’s distributed under an MIT license.
A particularly nice use of it in the wild is Zander Martineau’s Rather Splendid blog.
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