I made some changes to the site tonight:
- Added a Home Search Panel to the sidepanel. You may have to hit “refresh” to get this to show up right!
- Added a Print Post Option. I hate the idea of people printing out a blog… Blogs are meant for reading on screen where you can follow links and leave comments! However, I hate the idea of people wasting extra pages printing out blog posts even more. For those of you who were going to print stuff out anyway, it’s now a little cleaner and will hopefully use fewer pages!
- Added a Stat Page [no longer available] which proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that Ardell is the most prolific real estate blogger of 2006 (and we’re only in March!). For someone who only began blogging in January, she’s already authored 49 posts and 205 comments (192 under ARDELL and 13 under Ardell DellaLoggia). WOW!
Speaking of Ardell, I’ve heard from multiple agents that they are too intimidated by Ardell to begin commenting on the site. While Ardell is definitely a force to be reckoned with, I find that fact amusing because I imagine she wouldn’t mind a little more support from the agent community. Not that she needs it, mind you… Just that there is only so many hours in the day for her to keep up with two intelligent lawyers!!!
Still on my ToDo List is to:
- Clean up the RSS feed buttons. As was recommended in an earlier comment, I’ll probably add a subscribe page and limit the sidepanel to one subscribe button.
- Add avatars to comments. I am having some minor trouble getting things to look right with this one, but I’ll keep working at it.
Is there anything that is missing from Rain City Guide that you would like to see?
Great additions Dustin! I really digg the print feature – I like printing out stuff to grab with me to the car and other places(…) where I have a couple of minutes to read 🙂 I’ve been asking myself why people don’t have this print option where you would have only one clean post? Otherwise people have to highlight things and print only the selection out. I like the search panel too. Also you might want adding social bookmarking options – I see you’re using del.icio.us, I like the Y! MyWeb 2.0 – check into it.
BTW, are you going to let spiders crawl your print pages?
I noticed the search doesn’t work for me.
Thanks Max…
The search should be fixed now! Thanks for the heads up!
The social bookmarking tools are a a great idea and I probably would have stuck it in there already except I need to figure out a way to do it without things getting too cluttered. My test implementation showed that I should either have “tagging” at the bottom of each post or links. I’m sure there is a way to do both, but I haven’t seen it done well yet. I’ll keep thinking on that one.
I let myself to asume that AdSense is not a big deal for this blog, if its true, you can remove/move it and place the bookmarking links instead.
oh, btw, you can use icons for each bookmarking link – this way you can place 3,4 ot 5 icons right after the little printer (I would align them to the right to separate from the priter) . There are icons/logos available of /. delicious, Y!MyWeb2.0 etc. they won’t take much space and you won’t need to move anything around.
All good ideas… I figure out a way to make it work… and the adsense is definitely not a big deal on this site. The adsense was really just a test, so that would make a great place to put the icons…
Where are the polls? I’d like to see some fun polls!
Hmm… I’m thinking we need a poll of the sexiest agents in Seattle… Here’s poll I ran a while ago… Interesting stuff: