Welcome to the new Minneapolis Metblog!
You may or may not be reading this at minneapolis.metblogs.com. If you’re in your feedreader of choice, I invite you to click through and take a look at the new digs. Here’s what’s new and different:
- The major obvious thing here is the new look. The less-obvious thing is that all Metblogs are now running on Wordpress-MU (bye bye, Movable Type).
- User Registration: Sign up at my.metblogs.com, after which you can leave comments and participate in the forums. Had to be done. Sign up once and you’re set for life on any Metroblogging site. The usual things about how we don’t spam or sell your email address apply. You can additionally sign up for Network Announcements if you like.
- New Features: We’ve always had a Flickr group and the photos were tucked away in the sidebar. The animated Flash badge is now over there for all to see. You can now rate posts (these ratings help determine the Best Of Metroblogging). Some nifty polling features and Google Maps juju are on the way as well.
- Three New Views: If you’ll look here at the top of the page, there are three ways to look at Metroblogging Minneapolis: Recent Activity, Most Interesting and Most Active. Recent Activity will show what posts have recently been changed or had comments added to them. Most Interesting works on a special formula that we’ve determined, based on external links, comments and some other special sauce. Most Active will show you where the fire’s at.
- New Author Profiles: Check out the new Authors Section! We’ve done some work there to make sure that you can learn all about those who are writing here regularly.
We thank you for your patience as things are cleaned up and new features are rolled out over the next few weeks. We will update you along the way. Please, (sign up and) give us your feedback. (We already know that our old permalinks are broken. This will be resolved ASAP.) We’d love to hear what you think of the new design. In addition, if you have questions about specific features not working, drop a comment here and we’ll try to get it cleared up.
And, of course, keep reading. :)
Related posts:
Wow, they did a great job of making it really, really wide!
WordPress-MU is a smart choice though. Cool.
Yeah, I like the look of it, except for the wideness.
A couple bugs (or perhaps misunderstandings on my part):
The "Read and add to the comments" button doesn’t work in Safari 3.0.4 I don’t believe.
Also, the RSS feed: http://minneapolis.metblogs.com/feed/ doesn’t seem to contain this post.
Thanks, Aaron. I’ll pass those along to the people in charge of such things.
Upon further research, it seems that all the feeds (RSS 2.0, RSS .92 and Atom 0.3) do not contain new posts after the switchover.
The RSS link at the bottom right of the page contains truncated RSS spanning across all Metblog sites which I’d think would be pretty useless for almost everyone.
The feeds on Metroblogging Minneapolis were really good before. I hope they aren’t lost after the move. Because, well, I enjoy reading Metroblogging Minneapolis.
Wow. Really, really wide. The standard wisdom is to never make a site wider than 990px, since thats the basic size of a 1024×768 screen, plus a little browser chrome. This site clocks in at a hefty 1200px wide. Crazy wide! Not everyone has a powerbook or keeps their browser window maximized.
Aaron has the feed situation covered.
I find the font size a little on the small and light size, and I have designer eyes that like little 8pt type most the time. Maybe it’s just the full justification of the paragraphs that get me, adding extra word-spacing haphazzardly.
Also, more spacing between list items is always a good idea. It’s eminently more readable to have half an extra line between list items to show differentiation between items.
I know, it’s huge, right? I hear the width thing is some wonky CSS thing that’s being worked on.
I had the same reaction to all the post text elements you mentioned, Justin. I don’t know if the total width thing will positively impact that in any way. I feel like I’m getting old by complaining about the font size, though. Designer eyes? Heh!
I’m still getting used to the Wordpress UI, so there might be a way I can just code the list up better. But yeah list item line spacing, not built in.
Thanks for the feedback!
Looks like the RSS now works! Cool.
Swinging by (obviously belatedly) to check out the new digs, Erica. I’d be interested in your take on the transition between the MT and the Wordpress UI after things really shake out for you!