While I wait for my bedtime cup of hot chocolate to cool down (and yes, that really is the time), I just wanted to jot down a couple of little changes that almost no-one will notice, even fewer people will use, and that I'm fairly proud of regardless.
- Yesterday, I added social bookmarking links to the news and blog pages (as they're generated by the same chunks of code) to encourage a bit more user interactivity. No, it doesn't mean I'm expecting a gazillion people to descend on UPSU.net and declare it an amazing website, but it's definitely a start ;o)
- I also got round to turning on a redirection system which lets us create a news article as normal, but instead of showing a news page when people click on the article's link, they're sent automagically over to another page on UPSU.net. This is quite handy if we want to put up a short news story where the topic is already explained in more detail elsewhere on the site, which lets us cut down on maintaining information on the site. It also means we can start linking blog entries and forum posts into the news feeds, which means that people whose only contact through the site is via the RSS feeds can also be kept more up-to-date on changes on the site's non-news areas. Not that you lot out there in readerland will ever actually see the system in action until you click on something you think is news and get sent over to Fraggy's Sheep Worrying pages. Or something...
- Tonight, I've been tweaking the social bookmarking
toys links (sorry) and adding in a bit more control over comments - now we can turn the commenting system off on a news article (and soon you'll be able to do the same in your blogs if you want to) to let us gracefully close any discussions that get a bit too heated, or just when we're reporting on factual news and don't want to give the impression that we're asking for comment. Comments also automagically turn themselves off a month after a news story was last updated, so yesterday's news doesn't start attracting comments that won't be seen by the majority of the readership. The third (and best) benefit of this is that it reduces the number of news articles which our new best mates the spam bots are posting on, which makes my day a little bit smoother ;o)
Goddamn I need to get me a life... Or take up knitting or something... ;o)
Buenos noches darlings! /al
