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A freshly stirred Cauldron with new features
Image by thirtyfootscrew via Flickr
The keen-eyed among you who regularly visit my blog (and whose visits I am always grateful for) will have noticed big changes this week. No more minimalism, in three words. I got bored of all the white space. Forgive me if you liked it but change of all kinds is said by some to be the very reason for, and motivating engine, of existence. Go with the flow, I say.
I truly hope everyone visiting The Spicy Cauldron likes the changes. Here’s a list of them:
- A snazzy new Lijit Search box at the top of the right sidebar allows you to not only search the blog for articles you want to read, but also rummage through my stuff on Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, and other social networking sites.
- Drop-down listings for both categories and monthly archives have returned, and are now located in the left sidebar.
- There’s been a massive transformation in the way comments are handled and how they appear, thanks to IntenseDebate. You don’t have to sign up for a free account with these guys—it’s optional—and you can still leave comments same as before, only now you can reply to individuals, in what are called threaded conversations, and you can collapse or expand those conversations according to your whims and wants. I’m impressed by just how useful the ID services actually are. Consider giving them a try. Blimey. I just checked, and one of them is only 16 years old and ‘has already been involved in many web ventures’ apparently. It’s not that unusual these days, I guess. The company has just been bought by Automattic, the people behind WordPress, who own Gravatar and anti-spam system Akismet. So you can expect tight integration with those other services as time goes by, and increasing popularity for ID as well—so why not get in at the start of things, eh? Besides, the new comment widget in the right sidebar is real purdy, ain’t it? I think so!
- I’ve tweaked the CSS stylesheet slightly so that the fonts on the site are just a wee bit smaller than before.
- My latest tweet now appears at the top of the left sidebar.
- MyBlogLog members now get a listing of articles in the left sidebar tailored specifically to their interests (as determined by the tags on their user profiles). That’s right—the list you see is exclusively for your eyes only. If you aren’t yet a member, you’ll see a list culled from the interests of recent members who’ve visited here.
- There will be an increased number of (always legitimately-appropriated) pictures, links, and related stories from now on, from around the World Wide Web.
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