Use of images we don’t own is a big NO NO (10:53am on August 22): I’ve noticed that a number of posts have been included pictures. I wanted to make sure everyone knows that unless you:
- Took the picture yourself
- Downloaded it from a site that said it could be freely used.
- Got permission to use it (and just crediting the source is not enough).
You can’t use it. Now the likelihood that someone complains is low. But it is not worth the risk IMO.
The same applies to the banner image for the site (and that is a bigger concern). So I am going to disable that for now.
Snippets on the Main Page (11:24am on August 21): I have taken the liberty to edit a few of the more recent posts so only the first paragraph (or so) of text is included on the main page. That should make the main page easier to navigate as long posts won’t dominate it. For authors, you can insert a read more tag where-ever you want the text to break. Just position the cursor and then click the 4th icon from the right in the visual tab of the editor.
A Different Theme (12:16am on August 21): Lots of different themes/styles so I decided to experiment. This seems to be a nice clean one and addresses the font size issue some of you have mentioned. This is the 20-12 theme. Some of you might have seen the cols theme and commented on it in the game thread. Based on a quick look, these two looked the most promising (but there were hundreds of options). We can keep this one for a day or so and then switch to cols perhaps for feedback.
Customized Theme/Style (6:17pm on August 20): The theme/style has be tweaked a bit. The picture which was taking up a lot of space has been removed. And a tag cloud widget has been added (not much to see until more posts are tagged). The list of widgets has been re-ordered. Next:
- Pan to look at other themes/styles.
- What do readers think of only have a summary of the post on the main page? Note that I have edited this post to only show this initial snippet.
Please comment!
Suggestions for widgets (2:56pm on August 20): Would like to get feedback on adding a tag cloud to the set of widgets. Authors could add tags and categories (aka keywords) which makes it easier to get to sites based on those tags. For example, game post could be a tag. Clicking on it in the tag cloud could bring up a list of all the of game post blogs. Another one might be a list of sites (e.g., other interesting Nats related blogs like NI, WaPO NJ, and more.
Testing an idea (10:35pm on August 19): Jump to Comment Box – click this link to jump to comment box at the bottom of the page. This is hopefully an interim solution.
Updated (3:41pm EDT on August 19): And I have also pinned this to the top for now while experimenting with interface changes.
With Ghost’s permission, I plan to selectively change some things in the interface in order to get feedback from you (the readers). Please check the comments on this post to see what we are trying out. The changes should be global – i.e., you will see them on every post.
