There are always new gadgets, services, modules, and code to add features to a web site and as some folks have noticed I am endlessly testing and tinkering and sometimes abandoning different ways to serve up and share news and information about New Rochelle.
One of the hottest new “toys” is a Facebook “Like” button which has, according to Facebook, is very popular among Facebook users who use it to share on Facebook web pages (including blog posts) they find interesting. I just added that today and will see of folks like it.
This is in addition to the “share” button at the bottom of each full post where you can not only share on Facebook but Google Buzz, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg and much more. It is not only a good way to share with your friends but it is sort of like “voting” that you like a particular story which appeared on Talk of the Sound. We currently measure (and display to logged in users) how many “reads” a particular story had had; this will sort of be like that for people who are logged into Facebook. You will also see the “faces” of people who “like” a Talk of the Sound story. I think it is kind of cool and I am looking forward to seeing how it works out.
As was mentioned before, we have begun to use “categories” or “tags” in a more formal way. They are now fixed and selecting at least one is required for each post. By displaying a link to each category which, in turn, links to all posts tagged with that category, we have been able to create a Table of Contents so readers have the option of reading articles by subject matter rather than just by reverse chronological order as has been the case.
The middle column now has more of a logical flow — our 10 most recent articles, articles from other news sources that have some bearing on what is going on in New Rochelle, the Recent Comments scroll (I do not like the scroll but in the current version of our software this is as good as we can get) and then the Table of Contents.
The “And In Other News” box is a revamped version of the New Ro Buzz box. The New Ro Buzz is actually a “mashup” of thousands and thousands of “feeds”. It got to the point where I felt it was time to go from an automated computer-generated feed to a manual, human-edited feed. So, I am still reading the New Ro Buzz feed each day but I am manually selecting items from it and adding them to the renamed “And In Other News’ box on the home page.
I moved the calendar to the top of the rail. It is generally not wise to bump ads down in the right rail because advertisers do not like it but the calendar is VERY important and there was no good place for it in the logic-flow of the middle column.
Just for folks who are not clear on the left rail, I review every story submitted by contributors and “promote” some of them to the “featured stories” section which is the left rail where the stories are displayed more prominently.
All stories are also sent out as Twitter tweets and onto our Facebook page.
That’s about it for now. For you Facebook users out there I hope you like the new feature and make sure to “like early and like often”.