Well, as I’m sure you’ve all noticed, the new site is up. And, if I can toot my own horns (yes! all of them! I do ever so like to toot them), it’s pretty damn spiffy. I’d like to take a second to thank Alex and Colin for all their help in getting it up, as it really wouldn’t be done without them.
Now that I’m done with that paragraph, which I read in retrospect and feel I should rewrite with less innuendo, I’d like to take the opportunity to ask for your opinions! Staff and readers are welcome; this post serves as the official suggestion box for new features on the site. I’ll be taking the opportunity to list off a few I’ve already received by e-mail/Twitter below, but if you have a suggestion related to the website’s features or use itself, I’d love to hear it in the comments of this post.
This isn’t the place to bug me if you find a bug (pun!)—that you should still do by e-mail, since it’s more important. But for your feature requests and suggestions, this is where I’d like to hear them! As I complete them, I’ll be updating this post and marking what’s done (as well as announcing them on our Twitter—we’re @GameCola—follow us!), so you can check back and see if I’ve gotten to it yet! 🙂
So! Suggestions: go!
I’ve already received a suggestion to allow writers to be notified when someone comments on one of their posts.
If you’ve emailed or tweeted me a suggestion and I haven’t put it here, feel free to add it to remind me about it 🙂
Thanks guys!
Is there a way to tag a column as belonging to a specific column, e.g. “The Ten Reasons”. Is there a way to easily search for all “The Ten Reasons” columns”? I suppose the “tag” for a column works.
Thanks!
Mark – Columns should be tagged by author or editor to include the column name as a tag. Then, you should be able to find all issues of that column by clicking on it’s tag, for example: http://gamecola.net/tag/what-the-crap/
Eventually, we’ll get around to making a column list to all articles tagged with the column name to make it easier to browse for, I should think.
How about support for blog writing software (such as Windows Live Writer)? These currently aren’t supported because XML-RPC services aren’t in use (under options-writing.php)
Matt: I’ll look into it. The reason I have it disabled is because I’m not certain the custom templates we use for things will be applied on top of posts sent by this. Even a simple blog post uses a template to generate the thumbnails. But I shall investigate.
What do you think about adding polls?
I think it’d be cool if the featured article picture on the front page could kinda scroll through the last 5 or so articles (see gamestop.com, destructoid.com or ign.com for examples of what I mean). It would be a good way to share and extend the spotlight for newer articles a bit.
Is it possible to view all the article by a particular writer? Perhaps a writer’s link/name would link to that?
I’ve been tagging all my articles with my own name in order to do just that.
Kevin, do you think I should go back and tag all of our articles with the authors’ names, like Zach’s been doing? That might help with the problem of how to properly attribute articles with multiple authors, as well as the podcasts.
This is a good idea, I’ve been trying to do this mroe often, inspired by seeing the tags next to Zach’s drafts.
*more. Gah, a double post!?
I’d like to see the Article Rating meter be a little bigger so more people notice it.
Last time I checked, XHTML tags weren’t working in the comments for me. Oh, and wouldn’t “Leave a Comment” be more consistent than “Leave a Reply”?
When looking back through the archives, would it be possible to have a “Jump to page X” listing at the bottom, instead of clicking the “Older Entries” button a bunch of times?
Question: If we type something in “Excerpt”, will it come up under the main image on the front-page? I noticed the Willy Beamish article doesn’t feature the first few words from the article itself under the front page image.
Matt: Yup!
Then I would like to suggest adding Excerpt to the review template.
Can 1 article be authored (and edited) by more than 1 author? Might be nice to have some joined efforts.
Revoicing my earlier suggestion — please add excerpt to the review template. That way, on a skim-read, whoever’s editing the article at the end before release can take their favorite quote and use it for front-page and when browsing through the reviews on the site.
Also, Mark’s suggestion is definately worth considering. If that’s not possible, then I guess we’ll have to put a footnote in, or include a first line that says “co-authored by x and y”. That would definately work for excerpt, so I draw you to my original point for the possibly of excerpt used in reviews (revealing the potential for a joint review). Thank you. =)
Is it possible to log in but not go to my profile page (I assume this is only an issue for developers). Often I just want to log in so i can leave comments. Or is it possible to “stay logged in”?
It would be nice rather than having an “Older Entries” button to be able to have a sequence of numbers to go to the page and have a first/last link, similar to how the google does it. The google!
Dear GameCola staff, I have recently learned of a free google tool called “Google Analytics”. It moniters site traffic and displays things like, how people got to the site, how many people stay on the site, how long they stay on the site, specific stats for certain pages, and a bunch of other cool stuff. It’s like the youtube insight stats on steriods.
Like I said, it’s completely free. I can’t offer any advice on how to use it, I don’t have a website to test it out on, but I’m sure that if it’s the right thing for GameCola then you guys will be all over it.