SingingEels Update DONE! - I Can't Believe It
(
Mar 24 2008 - 05:56:44 PM by
Timothy Khouri) - [
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After battling with the database for the past hour, I'm finally done uploading all of the previous content (as well as the new code files) to the public SingingEels server! We've re-shaped the site to be a better community experience for everyone, and hopefully it will prove to do so.
What Has Been Removed
If you'll notice, we no longer have the "Top Authors" section on the right, nor do we have the "Poll of the Day". The reasons for both of these changes is that the "Top Authors" didn't bring any content to the page, and the "Poll of the Day" was more like the poll of the year... that thing got hard to maintain.
We also removed the "comments RSS" link on the left under the Syndication section. We're going to be adding RSS for comments on an article and blog post basis. This way you can be intuned with a particular subject, rather than just recieving everyone's comments about everything.
What We've Added
This is the exciting part. First of all, we've added a few more categories: LINQ, Silverlight and WCF for starters. We will likely be changing some of the old categories, and we'll probably also add more. Also, along with the "more categories" is a switch that we made to the category system alltogether. Instead of being "one to one", you can now specify multiple categories for an article.
Also, blog posts are able to be categorized in the same categories as articles can be. The purpose of this is to provide "related" blog posts next to the article that users are reading. This will help to keep old articles up to date by providing the most recent posts on the topic that users are reading about.
Community Experts
We have also added a "People to Follow" section (that appears when you're reading an article or blog post). This is a new feature that we are looking to explore to recommend proven community leaders in the topics that you're reading about.
This list will be kept clean to ensure that we don't recommend random bloggers who consider themselves "the server side guy" or whatever other rediculous self made titles they aquire.
Look and Feel
We've changed the look and feel a bit. We moved the "recent blogs" section to the right of the main content as we realize that articles (scrutinized content) was being put at a lesser importance. There have been a few other design changes, but not much.
Misc and Closing
As a side note, we've rewritten the entire site in .NET 3.5 using LINQ (LINQ to SQL in particular). This doesn't mean anything to you (the end user), but it was fun.
If you have any comments, please feel free to... comment on this blog post! Or you could always drop us a line through the Suggestions Box (link in the left nav). I'm going to focus back on quality articles now.