Greetings, Defamer readers. If you've been with us for a long time, you may have noticed a slow and steady bloat encroach upon what was once a tidy and compact visual read.

While you graciously said nothing, even as our waists expanded to genital-obscuring sizes and we started to shop at the "telecommuter leisurewear" section of Lane Bryant, we knew in our hearts that something needed to be done. Well, voila! And welcome to the new us. Don't worry about how we achieved it, just tell us we look amazing.

If you're wondering how this affects your daily Defamer read, it only enhances it, offering easy, skimmable access to a whole 24-hour posting cycle.

Some things to look for:

· Regular posts now have shorter ledes, and smaller, bolded headlines.
· High-priority stories will be designated "top" stories and get large headlines.
· If all you see is a line of text and a topic tag in a grey box to the left, go ahead and click it. A full post awaits you, and all the delights that entails. (It merely means we've exceeded the 35-word first-paragraph limit, resulting in a painful but not lethal jolt to our ankle-shackles.)
· Breaking, super-duper high-priority stories are designated "alert" stories, and will appear on a black background with white text, with an even larger headline. If you submit your e-mail address in the sidebar on the lower-left, these stories will be e-mailed to your throughout the day. Don't be left out of the cafeteria gossip!

Still with us? No? You're confused and hungry, and all this technical jargon is holding up the delicious babies-and-lox spread in the conference room? Well, we think we can help you, too:

· You see the menu bar at the top of the page, where it says "View?" By merely choosing the "Expanded" option, you'll get the chubby Defamer layout you're accustomed to.

What have we left out? Ah yes, those adorable little icons to the right of each headline.

· The clock, as you might have guessed, is a visual representation of time, i.e. when the post went up. In more recent posts, the clock will turn a deep shade of pink, probably out of embarrassment.
· The little fireball that wandered in from Donkey Kong tells you how many people have read this post. It lights up at 10,000—which in turn starts a Rube Goldberg contraption that delivers us a nourishing food pellet. So please, make every post reach 10,000! Our tiny new stomachs can now only handle portions the size of a kalamata olive.
· The dialogue bubble icon indicates numbers of comments. That fills in once 100 people have commented on a story—so there's some incentive for you, too.

Well, that about covers it! Wasn't that fascinating? If you find you're running into trouble with the new layout, send in your bugs, comments, complaints, and suggestions to Gawker Media Tech, or to us. Our 24-hour service hedgehogs are awaiting your calls.