Enhancements To The Blog

Regular readers may have noticed that over the past month or so, I have been making changes to this site. Most dramatically, I have replaced the old 2-column theme that was here for over two years with a new 3-column theme. Behind the scenes, I have also upgraded the blogging platform to WordPress 2.7.

With the new version of WordPress, I have added some new features that you may find useful. These are:

• Threaded comments. Now you can reply to specific comments in a post (click on the “Reply” link on the comment you want to respond to). You can also sign up for email notifications of any responses to your comments by selecting the email notification checkbox when you post a comment. You will also notice that my comments appear in green. Hopefully, the new threaded comments will make for a better discussion in the comments sections. I hope you will take full advantage of this feature.
• RSS feed by email. You can subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed via email by clicking on the email icon on the right side of the header. You can also subscribe to the post and comment feeds by clicking on the other two available icons. As always, you can use the feed icons at the bottom of the right sidebar to easily subscribe to this blog’s feed using your favorite RSS reader.
• Follow me on Twitter. My Twitter feed appears on the right sidebar. I have just started to use Twitter more frequently in the last few weeks. I welcome you to follow me on Twitter by clicking on the “Mash on Twitter” heading on the right sidebar. Right now the Twitter feed only shows my tweets. If the conversation grows, I will add all replies to the feed as well. Hopefully, Twitter will make this blog more interactive and more real-time.
• Most discussed and most viewed posts. On the left sidebar, I’ve added a Most Discussed list to show the posts with the most comments in the last 30 days. I’ve also added a Most Viewed list to show the top viewed posts on this blog. The most viewed numbers are skewed toward the newer posts because it only started to track the view count a few days ago.
• Sociable. At the bottom of each post, you will see a “Share this post” feature. This will allow you to quickly add the post to popular social networking sites.
• iPhone support. I have added an iPhone version of this blog. If you use an iPhone to access this blog, you will get a iPhone optimized look and feel. Try it and let me know what you think of it.

There are still a couple of things that are broken after the upgrade to WordPress 2.7 (most notably, the Reading Room page). I hope to get the kinks out over the next few weeks as time permits.

Thanks to everyone for reading. Please let me know via comment or the contact page what you think of the changes and if there is anything you would like me to change.