May Site Updates

We’ve been tinkering with a number of things on the site over the past few days. Some things make it easier for you stay connected to this little site. Others give you, our readers, a face. Some others… well… do other things.

This post discusses some of those changes.

We want to see your faces!

avatar We like knowing who we’re talking with, and even though our interactions on the site are (currently) limited to the comments we leave, we know we’re not talking to another computer. Behind the names, email addresses, and URLs are people - real people with real faces. That’s why we’ve installed gravatars that help us (and other readers) see you. Get your own gravatar so we won’t think you look like a gray lightning bolt.

By the way, if you’ve already got an OpenAvatar or MyBlogLog, you’re all set - we’ll show your avatar from there. I just went through the options again, and it looks like OpenAvatar or MyBlogLog will only work on my comments. Sorry - I got a bit confused there. Oh well, I guess that means you should get your own gravatar so we can see you.

We’ve opened up!

We’ve installed OpenID, so if you’ve got one, that should be all you need to leave a comment here. We’re not totally clear on how things will work if you want to subscribe to comments though, so do tell us if you run into any problems.

We’re having problems with the plugin and the formatting of the site, so we’ve shut the plugin off for now. Besides, there’s no need to login here anyway, so there’s no real need for this.

We’re mobile!

Do these icons look familiar? You’ve probably seen them above and off to the right. You probably know that the icon on the left leads to our our RSS feed. The other icons should tell you what they’re for, but just to make things clear, the icon with the phone lets you get our feed on your mobile, while the icon with the envelope lets you stay up-to-date via email.

We’ll get back to you!

We just installed the Comment Email Responder Plugin, so when we reply to your comment, you’ll know about it. You still have the option to subscribe to the discussion for a given post, but we know that sometimes, you don’t really want to get an email everytime somebody else posts a comment.

That pretty much covers most of the changes around here.

Do you like them? Do you hate them? Tell us about it!

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