New weblog awesomeness

Wow, so many exciting changes on this weblog! Here’s a list of all the recent improvements:

  • I’ve started rejiggering (heh) the sidebar a bit. Ratings now show up as their own item in the sidebar, instead of being lumped in under “categories.” Plus there’s now a list of ingredients, so you can see how many drinks have used each ingredient. More to come!
  • There’s now a search field in the sidebar, so you can type in bad words and find out how many times I’ve used them.
  • The home page and newsfeed for the site now display the beginning of most posts, rather than the entire post. I know people tend to have strong feelings one way or the other about this, so apologies if anyone is outraged by this change.
  • There’s now a list of related posts at the bottom of each entry. (Or not—sometimes there aren’t any sufficiently related posts.)
  • If you’re visiting on an iPhone or an Android device, you’ll now see a phone-optimized version of the site. If you’d rather view the regular site, there’s a link at the bottom of the page allowing you to do that.

Let me know what you think!

7 Responses to “New weblog awesomeness”

  1. throgers says:

    Am I outraged by the change showing only the beginnings of posts? I am outraged by ANY change. So yes- yes, I am. Fortunately, a cocktail eases this feeling.

    • Mari says:

      Agreed with above comment! I like being able to read the whole post in my rss feed! However, your site looks excellent and the other improvements are great. Well done.
      M

  2. Shelleth says:

    I agree with outrage over not being able to read posts in my RSS reader. I find that additional clicks create friction that discourages me from reading content behind a cut. I could rant at you a lot about UX stuff like this. What was your reasoning behind the change?

    • Jeff says:

      I had a couple of reasons for making the change:

      1. Almost everyone who reads this site was using an RSS feed rather than visiting the website, so I had no way of tracking what people are actually reading.
      2. Some of my posts are getting awfully long, to the point where I suspect that most people would rather not have them clogging up their news feed. (I know that I rarely read lengthy posts in a news reader—if I don’t have to click through to read them, I just gloss over them.)

      That said, I care a lot about user experience, so we should talk more about this sometime. I’d love your input!

      • Jeff says:

        Argh, that ordered list was not formatted properly in any way, shape, or form. Yet another CSS-hacking task to tackle…

  3. Rich Falernum says:

    I like the sidebar updates. For instance, it allowed me to note, quite rapidly and with little effort, that you have only posted one whiskey drink thus far. Regardless of what your RSS is doing to your CSS in its UX, your readers should be most outraged by the blatant lack of whiskey. Gentleman’s Companion, indeed!


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