Kiwiblog 2.0
Okay after many dedicated hours and days of design, configuration plugin installation and testing, thanks to the good folks of Inspire Net, we have moved over to the new installation.
Obvious changes are moving to the two sidebar format, having the display fill the screen width more, and a cute wee banner. It is also set up to take more advertising. Thanks to the dozen or so businesses who are patiently waiting for a rate card. The new blog has a Neilsen Net Ratings subscription so after a couple of weeks of using their system to measure traffic, we should be able to produce a rate card.
There are quite a few extra features for readers:
- Comment Karma – you can now vote good comments up and bad comments down. Will be a good way of highlighting good comments. We did try and install another plugin which similiar to slashdot would also allow one to filter by comment rating and assign default karma to a user so good commenters start off with higher defaults. But that plugin is designed for low traffic blogs, not one with over a hundred thousand comments on it – the server died despite all attempts. But even this one should be fun
- Tags – each post will have tags (which can be any word or words) as well as categories. You can bring up all posts with a particular tag, view the most popular tags in a tag cloud, and even set up an RSS feed for a particular tag.
- Online Users – The blog will show how many people are online and if they are logged in users, who they are. Again should be fun. There could be privacy issues in theory (your boss notices you are on Kiwiblog all day long) but common sense should prevail.
- Polls – we now have a very easy to use, and easy to answer, poll plugin. Expect lots of fun polls in the sidebar. And in theory it track votes by both cookie and IP address so the vote stacking some media website polls get should be avoided. Just remember still totally unscientific though.
- Edit your own comments! Yes for the period of 15 minutes you will be able to edit your own comments if you make a typo etc.
- See how many comments made. Next to a commenters name, it will now display how many comments in total they have made on this blog.
Hope you all enjoy it.
[Update: I have disabled some of the useronline functionality for now, as it was just revealing a bit too much detail such as referring URLs and IP addresses]