Site Updates

I’ve been working on updating the site over the past week, adding some new functionality and trying to fix some long-standing problems.

You will notice that some posts, like Carole’s Writer’s Workshop are now grouped together with a special series link that appears at the top. Although we already have category tags that can do this, we hope this will help highlight some of the special series we regularly host on this blog.

You will now see 3 “possibly related posts” linked at the bottom of every post. Having been doing this for a few years now, we have a huge back catalog and we hope posting these will get people to explore the site a little deeper. These are only “possibly” related because the suggestions are made by an algorithm, so don’t blame us if the suggestions are way off!

We’ve also implemented page caching along with image and code optimization. These should hopefully serve up pages faster, with less of a burden on our servers. If you notice anything different other than the fact that pages are loading faster then something is probably wrong. Please let us know.

One thing that is gone is the WordPress “like” button. The way it was implemented was causing some problems. If I can figure out how to bring it back, I will, but for now it is gone. Sorry about that.

I’m not done with all I have planned yet. I’m still working on trying to clean up some layout bugs, especially with the mobile site. Hopefully that will get done in the next few weeks. If anyone out there is a webdesign genius who can help us clean up some of our code to better conform to web standards and further speed up the site, please let me know. We aren’t planning on another redesign anytime soon, just trying to squeeze the most out of what we already have.