(cont’d) Referring to this:
 
>>365912  

I was thinking of a Google-style site menu bar on top, with the same color scheme; and make the user bar become a little drop-down menu that’s also touch-friendly.
 
And the search bar would be right next to the site menu bar’s buttons, matching the Recent Images bar on the bottom.
 
I’m trying to learn CSS and HTML so I can test it out for myself to see if it’s easy to use.

Have at it. Let’s see if it’s as good as this homepage.

@The Smiling Pony  
Oops! I meant more of a permanent placement, not constantly switching around. I agree that that would be confusing.  
The comments and forum posts are constantly changing so they should be at the top, as they probably hold more interest.
 
_{…But whatever you do is fine…}

@Petedash  
There will be a separate Lists page showing the top 5 or whatever.
 
The top 2 is there so that people can know there is a lists page with this information available.
 
 
@JP  
Maybe in the future…
 
 
@Keith Mowz  
We´ll see how it goes. I also want to give livestreams more visibility, and as it is Forum activity would be on the “third line”, which should still be pretty visible on most monitors.
 
 
@Etherchanter  
I think that could end up being a bit confusing, if on every refresh the order of entire sections starts switching around.

Between too small top 2s and no tops at all , I’d rather have no tops at all…
 
it removes the point of having tops , when only 2 are there…

Yelling at you for your sheer incompetence and monumental hubris.
 
There, now that that’s out of the way, I’d say it looks good. Nice and orderly, nothing obtrusive.

I’ve been using the “Activity” page as a home page for the last week and I can definitely enjoy this, I’ve been to other parts of the site a lot more than usual.
 
Maybe have the sidebar ordered by frequency of change with the stuff that changes more at the top? Like:
 

Only tweak I’d make would be to bump the forum posts up one further. If you want to get people to really start using it, you have to get their attention with it.

@JP  
That’d be cool, but quite complex indeed

One idea, if it isn’t too much code to write, would be to let users choose what they want to see on the sidebar and even reorder the sections. For example, if I don’t want to see any forum activity or livestreams, I can close those parts by clicking the tiny X’s somewhere. Perhaps the whole user menu bar could live on the sidebar if it’s enabled? If the menu items are put inside a list (looking at the page’s source code, they aren’t now), then you could shape and style the list and make it go horizontally or vertically by simply changing a few lines of CSS.

It so horrible it gave my cat cancer. I hope you are proud…

I liked the sidebar at left on the first preview, though it still pretty sweet overall
 
Anyway i probly gonna stay on the ‘image only’ home but this surely is a step fowards :D