This blog is basically like the old blog, it just has a lot more functionality.  This blog also works like the old blog, just click on (recent) to see the recent posts like the old blog. 

I spent a lot of time, money, and thought on the new blog and I'm not done with it yet, so your comments don't make me feel too good.

Remember the old blog, it was the same way, when I first launched the old blog, many people hated it, but over time they grew to love it just like you loved the old one; however in time after we polish this one up more, you will come to like it too and you would not want to go back

The lack of threaded posts is a serious loss of functionality.

I took the majority of the ones I was holding

I have some left incase it makes the run to 8.60

that is on the list

It feels the same way to me also.  My computer had to be rebooted twice this morning and that's never happened before.  Guess I'll have to figure out how to download a new "browser".

- feels bloated and sluggish - not everyone has a super-high-speed connection...

Your first page load may be a little slower than it was on the old blog but subsequent page loads should be faster. The new blog is actually a smaller page load in terms of total page size, and in my case most pages are being served in under a half of a second.

What browser are you using? If you are using ie7 or ie6 it may feel slow because it is using advanced JS features that MS did not optimize for. Newer browsers such as ie8, safari, chrome, and firefox 3.5 have GREATLY improved JS performance and I recommend you upgrade if you are using an older browser.

- pages too short

There are actually typically more posts per page now than there was on the default view of the old blog. However we will probably be upping the default to 25 tonight, and adding back in a selector later in the week to allow you to view quite a few more posts if you so desire. We didn't enable this initially because we wanted to make sure performance would be stable during the trading day.

- I am online now but my name doesn't show (no big deal but is this even a useful feature? makes for long empty pages)

Members online would more aptly be called Members with existing sessions that are less than 30 minutes old. It's not meant to be a definitive list, but more of a way for you to gauge trends in terms of how many people are online during what times of the day, as well as a way to find out about new people. We will be tweaking the members online feature. Ultimately we would like to use it as a spring board for getting people to interact with each other. You may notice that if you click on a members name anywhere on the site you will now go to a page listing their posts and favorites. Maybe this will convince some lurkers to make some comments now that their posts are easy to find. At a minimum though we will be adding more features to what will become a "profile page"

 - when replying I should not be asked below to "designate" it from the list of topics - the designation belongs to the original entry! Also this whole Topics business is artificial and arbitrary and not very useful in my opinion - I always use "All" anyway. What topic does this discussion on the blog belong to?

This is an off topic conversation, and you are absolutely right that when replying you shouldn't need to pick a topic. I will get this straightened out. Will probably also add a channel link next to each parent post's info letting you know what topic something is in if you are on the view all view. The topics can be pretty useful, particularly for non day traders who are not on the blog all day.

 -also the "select...designation" below should be a selection list with a separate button for "Submit)

this is actually the same way it used to be done, but we are considering using a check box rather than buttons or a select field.

- first impression: no big deal - using "recent" and "all" guarantees you don't miss anything - time-stamp on all expanded entries is good (I asked for it so I am happy it's here!)

Hooray!

actually this blog is faster than the old blog, I can see the time in ms and it's faster and the server load is less than the previous one. Don't just assume that it's slower with only a couple of posts.

If you click on "Recent" next to "View All", you get the messages in order (like the old blog).  Then you can read all the replies/posts since the last time you checked.

Congratulations on getting the new site up and running. I know it has been a long process and no doubt many hours have been spent. From my brief tour so far I have to say it is a big improvement.

I just did a side by side comparison with IE8 and Firefox. I did not notice any difference in appearance between the two. But, when I clicked on the first chart posted in the blog, Firefox took 16 seconds to open it whereas IE8 took only 2 seconds!

I switched from using Firefox to IE8 when it came out and have not gone back to Firefox. I liked Firefox much better than IE6 or IE7, but IE8 seems to me to be the quickest browser yet.