Spring Cleaning

Overall, I’ve been quite happy with the feedback gotten about the site so far. It’s still quite young however, and therefore, there are a few changes that I thought needed to be made to help it continue to grow, and hopefully make it easier for readers to find and use the content here. For anyone interested, I thought I would highlight the changes.

First off, I’ve increased the focus on past posts. I decided to add a listing of the latest posts to each page, as well as a listing of the most popular posts on the site in terms of views. The idea here is to hopefully make it easier for you to find earlier posts that you may have missed that may still be worth a look.

I also decided to add full RSS feeds. I have heard a lot about the debate between partial and full feeds and wasn’t sure at first how to proceed with them. Up to now, I had just been offering partial feeds. I am still keeping those, for any of you who do prefer them but I am also offering an RSS feed with the full posts in them now for those of you who prefer to have the entire article in front of you.

One new area in the footer is a listing of the galleries that were gracious enough to link to my site. I was overwhelmed by the positive response to the design of the site, and those galleries are how quite a few of you first came across the site. I thought I would finally get around to returning the favor by supplying some links back to them.

Finally, I decided to embed by Twitter status into the site. I fought the Twitter urge until March, but once I finally gave in, I’ve become fairly addicted. It’s a makes it easy to keep connected with people who you may not converse with a whole heck of a lot otherwise, and if you are following the right people, it can be quite the news informant…lots of tech news seems to hit Twitter before anywhere else. To sum it up, you could do a lot worse for a networking tool.

Now, with all the new additions, something had to go to clear up some room. So, I decided to pull the “Things I Learned Online” section. Actually, I’ve wanted to do something different with that anyway, and this made for a good excuse. By only showing a couple links at a time in the side, I felt that some of the articles and tools I come across probably weren’t getting the attention they deserve given their quality. I wanted a way to highlight a few more at a time, and to do it in a way that brings a bit more attention to them.

So after much hemming and hawing I decided to occasionally post a small group of links to resources, articles and tools that I have found that I think may interest you. Don’t worry…I’m not going to turn into a site that posts nothing but lists of other sites, nor am I going to start doing a whole bunch of Digg-made top 10 posts. The bulk of the posts here are still going to be the same kind of content you’ve been seeing with focuses on technical, design, and theoretical articles…I’ll just occasionally throw some focus out to other articles that I think are worth a read.

Having said all that (that was a bit more long-winded than intended), I’m always interested in improving the quality of what my site has to offer. So, if anyone has any strong opinions about any new changes (good or bad), or has some other ideas they’d like to see implemented (content or just enhancements), let me know.