With the old layout, there was little incentive to read many of the stories in full. The excerpt from one recent post, "Official Beer from the White House Bee Hive," reads: "The White House got all pretentious with its beer selection at yesterday's Super Bowl party. This concoction, the 'White House Honey Ale,' was made with one pound of honey from the White House Bee hive, and you'll never get to taste it." OK. That's all I needed. Next.

But a series of excerpts is not what Denton wanted. He envisioned a way to call out a particularly compelling story instead of burying it just because it had aged by a few hours -- or even minutes as Gawker's output continues to climb. When he references a transformation in his manifesto, Denton is talking about the move away from the traditional reverse-chronological blog format. In the new design, the blog scroll has been moved to the right-hand column, where headlines of each post are displayed in that old, familiar order. The primary column, which fills two thirds of the page, displays one big story -- "one visually appealing 'splash' story, typically built around compelling video or other widescreen imagery and run in full," is how Denton described it back in November. "At its best, a splash will match in visual impact the cover of a magazine or a European tabloid newspaper; and exceed it because the front-page image can actually move."

But Denton is already conceding, if not in words then certainly in practice. We've yet to see a story "run in full" on the main Gawker site: We're getting bigger pictures, as promised, but those are still accompanied by an excerpt (to click through makes your visit count as at least two pageviews) and, sometimes, a list of stories and excerpts that looks remarkably similar to the old Gawker.

They take up more of the page now -- two thirds! -- but we're still just getting a series of excerpts and thumbnail images in, look at that, reverse chronological order. Glynnis MacNicol noticed this same thing, calling attention to it on Business Insider this morning: "After a bumpy rollout yesterday, and the expected howling from regular readers, Gawker appears to have already dialed back on its redesign plan to only feature one big story on the homepage." She updated the post when Denton responded "that post is just an overnight roundup. Look at site during course of day." Well, I did. The screenshot above was taken yesterday afternoon.

If Denton is slowly crawling back to the old design to keep regular readers comfortable, I don't blame him. Maybe the blog isn't dead after all. We've grown so accustomed to the format that change is shocking. Look at the numbers. Former Gawker editor-in-chief (and current editor of The Atlantic Wire) Gabriel Snyder tweeted on February 2 that pageviews fell at io9 and Jalopnik, two of the first Gawker properties to roll out the new design, by as much as 33 percent. That trend has continued for the past week with weekday traffic resembling what you might have expected on a Saturday or Sunday with the old design. (People, it turns out, still do things away from their computers on the weekend, when traffic across the Internet dips. Sitemeter numbers for io9 and Jalopnik.)