Hacked By M0µ34d

With the start of the new year of 2009, we’ve made some pretty significant changes to CerealWednesday.com Some of these are blatantly obvious while others… not so much. Here’s a brief outline of what’s changed:

Revolution2 Template

The biggest visual change has been in the template. We are no longer using a tweaked Neo-Sapien Theme, but have instead switched over to Brian Gardner’s revamped Revolution2 Theme Line and chosen to use a tweaked Church Theme. One of the tweaks I did was so that the latest actual Cereal Wednesday Episode remains at the top of the home page. This was always something I wanted to do, and not having it before limited to a degree what got posted on this blog. Now with the latest video always at the forefront, it is always readily accessible by just dropping onto the homepage.

We’ve made the conscious decision to use Viddler as the video player on the blog from now on. They offer a number of benefits (such as a branded and sizeable video player) over the other video sharing sites.

The homepage itself is broken into a magazine style layout. Below the featured Cereal Wednesday Episode you will find two columns. The Marbits and 120 Seconds Episodes on the left, News items on the right, and below those columns are a single column of posts that are a mix of Trivia and Randomness including our new T-Shirt Of The Week feature.

Ratings

The ability to rate episodes was something I originally had incorporated in this blog, but during the Neo-Sapien Theme era it fell by the wayside through attrition due to load times and template issues. So now with the upgrade to WordPress 2.7 and a ratings compatible theme, individual post ratings are back. I know it is very easy to give every post 5 stars… because c’mon… we’re excellent and all that… but no one is actually perfect… so I just ask that you rate honestly.

Nested Comments

One of the most touted features of WordPress 2.7 was the new commenting system that allows nested comments. This was the feature I was most happy to get added on with the Revolution2 Theme. I think that having the threaded nested comments makes it a lot easier to be able to carry on a conversation. One of my biggest frustrations with the entire @Commentator type of conversation was the fact that if I responded after four other comments had been made, you would have to scroll up to re-read the original comment to put it into context. The comments can be nested up to 5 deep.

We continue to utilize both Gravatar (that displays your own avatar based on your e-mail address) and Commentluv (that gives you a link back to your latest blog post) in the comments section. Commenting also gives you the option to Subscribe To Comments Via E-Mail so you can stay up to date with the latest breaking conversation.

Subscription Center

We continue to provide you with a number of ways to catch all the epsiodes of Cereal Wednesday, and our Subscription Center makes subscribing all the more easier. You can subscribe via regular RSS Reader, through iTunes, for Zune, for another Podcatcher of your choice, and finally via e-mail using the built-in form.

Why is subscribing so important? By subscribing you can be assured that you will never miss an episode or a tid-bit of cereal related news that we post. Additionally, there is our next new feature that you can ONLY GET BY SUBSCRIBING…

RSS Only Content

You really should subscribe.

Did you subscribe yet? You’ll never know what your missing until you do…

Online Global Video Views

One of the things that I always found interesting was how the number of views a video got on different video sharing sites. Now, thanks to TubeMogul, we have a running tally of video views for all of the Cereal Wednesday accounts across all of the video sharing sites for live videos. Now this number isn’t TOTALLY accurate, because for the first season I had uploaded all the Cereal Wednesday videos to my Personal YouTube Channel. I have since opened a Cereal Wednesday YouTube Channel where all the videos now go. It’ll still be an interesting number to check every now and then.

A Little Feedback

So that pretty much sums everything up. So here’s a little poll voting to help tell me what revamped feature you like the best:

Feel free to leave any other suggestions/critiques in the comments. Thanks!

Tags: Brian Gardner, Cereal Wednesday, ITunes, On the Web, RSS, WordPress, wordpress 2.7, YouTube, Zune

This entry was posted on Monday, January 5th, 2009 at 12:01 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.