Over the past few days, I have been making a few changes to the web site to improve the experience.
Some folks already noticed that I re-wrote how the “recent comments” are displayed. There is a box on the home page that indicates the user, the title of their comment, when they commented and what article they commented on.
Last week I created a newsletter and sent it for the first time. This is intended to be a weekly feature. This should really have been set up from day one but I kept putting it off because it is more work for me and I am already busy. If you would be interested to become the editor of the newsletter please contact me. I add some additional software to the site that now allows people to subscribe to the newsletter as part of the sign up process; that should have been there from the beginning. Some people did sign up for the newsletter anyway even though we never sent one. Since it is so easy to unsubscribed, I have updated some of the other accounts to be subscribed so that mostly all registered users are now subscribed. If you start getting the newsletter and do not want it just click the link at the bottom of the newsletter to unsubscribe.
I added the ShareThis button back to the site. Now, on every article you can click the ShareThis button to share a particular article via your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Digg or similar social media sharing site or service. Just click the link to see a set of choices.
I added the Blog Talk Radio player to the home page. It will not stay there forever but just until folks get used to it. To listen to the show at 11 am on Friday just click the little “play” button. Immediately after the show ends at noon on Friday it is archived as a podcast. You will see a list of the 5 most recent shows (we have only done 2 so for now there are just 2), just select one by clicking on it and then press “play”.
I am creating a “wiki” for New Rochelle. This is like Wikipedia but hyper-focused on New Rochelle. We are allowed, under their Creative Common license, to use their material as a starting point but they limit the level of detail (content can be deleted on Wikipedia for being non-encyclopedic) so we will want volunteers to help us drill down deeper on New Rochelle — the people, the neighborhoods, the history and more.
I finally figured out why the user picture feature was not working. Ironically, it came to me while I was creating the wiki. If you want a photo to appear next to your comments you can now do that by going to your user profile and uploading a square image file that is 85 x 85 pixels, less than 30k in file size. If you want this and need help call me.
When people complain or make requests on ways to improve the site, I do listen. Sometimes it takes a while to get the good ideas implemented. If you have more ideas on how to make the site better please add a comment below or email me.