OD Social Media Report

16 Comments

1. Is the new design final? I still think that the fonts could be better. The blog articles should also have the author’s name near the top, under the title. I believe that is how it used to be.

2. Well, if I’m to be read by passerby on the information superhighway, then I ought to put on my company manners.

3. We’re still working on it. There are a number of things that have to be changed. In particular, want to get the numbered comments back.

4. I also liked the authors name under the title better.

5. Yes, author’s name up top. Also, and just throwing this out there, JS-Kit has a comment program where you can rate a comment up or down. It really enhances the “feel” of the comments because lurkers can vote up or down and you can get the overall ideological bent of the readership.

   Here is a site that uses it:

   http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/

   Thanks for everything.

6. 1.) 28,000+ unique visitors in May. We set new records on Awstats, Quantcast, and Alexa.

   That’s really impressive. REALLY impressive.

   Well done, Hunter.

7. PLEASE remove the title from over the great Raphael painting. It even obscures the faces of Plato and Aristotle. It is ugly and an insult. Maybe you should poll your readers?

8. The style set comes like that. The link has to be removed and put above the banner. That requires editing the style.css file which could prove tricky. It is one of the many small changes that have to be done.

9. It would be a lot easier if we had a full time webmaster like other similar sites that have raised tens of thousands of dollars. Unfortunately, I am stuck with the role of publisher, editor, lead blogger, webmaster, designer, and social media manager.

   And that’s just for OD. I now have to do TOQ Online and Occidental Observer now. Not to mention other projects.

10. I strongly dislike comment rating systems. I feel that it really brings down the quality because it encourages people to pander for (pointless) votes. Actually, I dislike it so much that when some sites switched to a rating system I used adblock to hide the element that displayed the rank. Heh, that sounds pretty anal now that I think about it.

    Basically, I don’t think it increases the quality of commentary.

11. Agree with author on top and no rating system.

12. Hunter, I know the HTML and CSS changes needed to fix the title.

    I will open a thread in the forum about it, I am willing to do some webmaster tasks pro bono. With the template PHP and CSS files I could change the it to your specifications and then send the files back.

13. I just dropped a message about it in the existing Blog Theme thread.

14. What do you think about placing the search box in the upper right instead of the lower right?

    Everything under ‘Meta’ seems redundant to me. I think most users look for RSS at the top of the site anyway.

15. @Hunter

    You still need to get yourself a mailing address.

16. Hunter Wallace says:
    June 1, 2010 at 5:21 am
    The style set comes like that. The link has to be removed and put above the banner. That requires editing the style.css file which could prove tricky. It is one of the many small changes that have to be done.

    A different way would be to edit the picture file to add a banner of white space (or blue or black) to the picture above the image. Then when the ‘style set’ puts the title on the image it will be on the pasted on “banner” part and not the painting part.

    It would be pretty easy to add the banner to the image in a program like “paint” or a good photo editor