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.

If you ever wrote anything for Savage Minds under your own account – meaning you had a username and password at some time in the past, we we would like you to login and update your account profile. After a year-long outage we recently re-launched the site with a new design and all our archives restored. Unfortunately, in the process a lot of user data got lost. In many cases it was probably out of date as well. The new design does a better job at highlighting individual authors, with a bio appearing below each post, and at the top of archive pages for each author. Updating your bio will make sure that this information is up-to-date.

A few notes:

1. Your password is probably lost or missing. Please click on the “Lost your password?” link to have a new one sent to your email address. If you don’t know which email address was associated with the account, please email us and we’ll let you know. (Once you login you can change your email address if you like.) You can also reset your account using your username.

2. If you’d like to associate a photo avatar with your account, please create an account at gravatar.com and associate this email with an avatar on that site. (Our site will automatically link with your gravatar image.)

3. If you have a wordpress.com account you can link that to your profile (after you login) and then from then on you can login to Savage Minds simply by clicking on the “Login with WordPress” button.

4. Please keep your bios short – just two sentences should be enough. You can add a URL linking to your webpage, twitter account, academia.edu profile, etc.

Finally, if you blogged for us in the past, maybe you’d like to do so again? We currently are booked for guest bloggers through the end of 2014, but we are already looking for people to blog in 2015. If you yourself aren’t interested, maybe you know someone who would be?