New Stuff: Theme, Feeds, and other cool stuff

Well, I've thought about it, worked it over in my head, and tested the hell out of all the ideas I could come up with. And what you see before you is the new Scooby Central.

Idealogies:

I debated long and hard about the header, but finally decided to do it. I think it fits the idea of my life anyway, so I've added it. This doesn't mean that it's not still Scooby Central, just that I'm the one who usually posts the most so I decided to add a personal flair here and there.

New Images for Team Members:

Thank GOD for Blogger Beta! I can finally tweak the code without having to spend hours and hours behind the pc. So if there are any of you who don't like their current picture, or who want to have one added, let me know and I'll put you on the right side of the page with a link to your profile, myspace, yahoo, and whatever else you'd like to have listed.

New Feature: Recent Comments

Since I'm the author of the blog, I always get notified of comments made to any post, but some of the others of you are regular readers too. You have no way to know if someone has commented on anything unless you manually search through the blog to look for them. This feature will post the most recent comments on the left side of the screen for you, so you don't have to look. I'm hoping publicizing the comment feed will increase response a little bit in the long run.

New Feature: Labels

If you've ever wanted to browse a certain "type" of post, now you can. When making your posts on the blog, simply choose a label to apply to that post and it will automatically create a category on the left sidebar that will allow them to be viewed together. The "africa" section is a good example; I went back and marked all my posts from overseas as "From Africa" so now they'll always be easily searchable together in one place. We could have sections called "reviews, recipes, movies," etc.. whatever you want. Further, you can apply multiple labels to posts as well, so if I have a picture to post I can tag it for photos, and for Africa and then it will show up in both sections of the blog. (Yes,I know there are HUNDREDS of photo posts that require tagging. I haven't felt THAT motivated yet.)

New Feature: Subscriptions

Relax, most of you don't blog enough to need to know what this is, so don't worry about it. Basically, you can click on the appropriate link and then your chosed feed program will notifiy you automatically of updates. Unless you're Me or Burke, you won't use this feature much, but I hope to attract other visitors from around the world that might have enough interest in what we say to stay tuned to it.

New Feature: Internet News

Stuff like this is why I like the new beta blogger. I can add code to the site in a matter of seconds now. This is a "feed" mentioned above that updates automatically from internetnews.com's RSS burner. They have some pretty interesting news on there from time to time and I thought you might find it useful.

Well, that's about it for the updates for now. I'd like to hear any feedback about the design. I've spent about 10 hours on it in the last day, so spend 30 seconds telling me what you like or what you think needs improvement.

SPECIAL THANKS:

I'd like to thank Sassenach for helping me with this. She's always been the one to get down and dirty and tell me exactly what she thinks of my ideas. It was with her help that I reconstructed this from scratch today. It looked really.. umm.. well.. bad when she got her hands on it and her opinions were as prevalent as they were welcome! Thanks Sass! And thanks to you too Shak, for your input last night. I hope you can tell I took some of your ideas to heart in the design process.

If ANYONE can't see the blog correctly, please let me know. With any massive update, there are always possibilities that compatibility might be a problem, so I depend on you all out there to let me know.

Special thanks to Hackosphere for all the great blogger hacks. I couldn't have done it without all the hundreds of hours of programming he's already put into his web site.

Toodles for now.