We've come a long way from our days as a one-person blogging operation and this redesign reflects our evolution into a news operation that now posts some 50 stories a day.

This new condensed format, which is being deployed across the entire Gawker Media empire this afternoon, will make it easier to scan more headlines and speed up the page load time. By condensing the front page, we hope you'll find it makes the site a little less, well, overwhelming. One of the drawbacks of the traditional blog format is that great stories that we post in the morning can get buried by the afternoon. And if you only check our site a couple times a day, you're probably missing a lot.

Change is always jarring, but for those who like the old ways, you can always go back to our classic view by selecting "Expanded" in the View menu in the black bar at the top of the page. There are also some handy new tools up there for sorting items, too.

One other new feature we're introducing is email alerts that will go out whenever big stories break. You can subscribe by signing up with your email address in "Subscribe to Gawker" box over on the left. Update: That'll also sign you up for our daily digest. So one email a day, plus the breaking news ones, which are much more sporadic.