As you can see, some pretty drastic changes have made their way to SFN. Firstly, we’d like to congratulate the winner of the banner/logo design contest, Dustin Rhodes for his contribution. As promised, a gift card has been sent to him on behalf of O3 Strategies.

Here’s some other things you may want to check out.

We’ve included a new integration with Flickr allowing the community to share photos with eachother. We see this as a great addition, especially on gamedays to get some great shots that we might not have otherwise seen. It’s also great for our out of town viewers to still get as much “feel” of the game through your work.

Photo community. If you have a Flickr account, integration and sharing is easy. Browse to our Flickr group page and register to be a part. You can then use photos from your photostream to add to the group. This will automatically get updated with the 9 most recent right here on SFN. Although tailgate photos are welcomed, lets keep the photos as G-rated as possible. We encourage everyone to share and contribute to the community, so adding a new media enables us to take that to the next level.
Pagination that works. Comments are now (functionally) paginated. No more loading 80,000 comments at a time!
Easier backtracking. Browsing past entries is now easier with our archives page and the navigation up top.
Mobile viewing. Check out SFN on your iPhone or smartphone. The iPhone version is a little buggy but works overall. We’ll iron that out as time goes. Let us know what you think!
Registration issues. We’ve been hearing some complaints that folks will register but never receive the email password. Hopefully this is remedied but if you have this issue, please let us know!
We will also be rolling out more features as time goes by, so stay tuned.

UPDATE 11:00: The blogroll has been temporarily moved from the sidebar to the top navigation (very top). The blogroll, being as expansive as it is, was hindering page load times. Until we figure out a way around this, all of the external links are listed on the blogroll page.

Bug Fixes

Keep the info coming in the comments section

Fixed one of the banner issues in IE6. IE6 still looks terrible. Microsoft is ending support for that archaic browser but we’ll try to maintain support for our IE6 viewers
The Blog Roll has been reestablished in the sidebar for those of you looking for links to external sites.
The “popular” tab is now narrowed down to popular posts within the last month.
iPhone users will now be able to see the comments on posts.
IE6 is a bit more presentable now (still, you should upgrade)

63 Responses to The New & Improved [Updated 11:00]

VaWolf82 05/11/2009 at 5:26 PM #

Add me to the list where work mandates IE6. We have intranet applications that allegedly misbehave with later versions.
ruffles31 05/11/2009 at 10:24 PM #

I like the new look and feel. I do have one question though:

I for one liked to see all comments on one URL. Is there an option to have different pages for the comments or one page that includes all the comments? Or can we increase the number of comments per page from 10 to 25 or 50? That would be better when I check this from work, less page views. 🙂

Thanks.
highstick 05/11/2009 at 10:46 PM #

It would immensely help to increase the comments to reduce the number pages if that can be accomplished. Old horses change a little slowly so give me some adjustment time.

Now if any of you guys who recommended that I switch to Firefox can give me some tips to speed it up. It’s gotten slower but has definitely reduced the adware, spyware, and virus issues since I changed.
o3strategies 05/11/2009 at 11:58 PM #

In regards to comments:

The reason it’s 10 per page is to help with bandwidth issues. When hot topic items pop up, it’s not uncommon for SFN to get thousands of page views a day (the blog averages 3.5m hits a year). Since this is being run out of the charity by some of the editors, we’ve tried to take proactive steps to reduce the amount of data requested by each page view.

Would it help to reverse the order of the comments? Have the latest comments appear as page one and the oldest comments appear as page n?
Noah 05/12/2009 at 9:02 AM #

Would it help to reverse the order of the comments? Have the latest comments appear as page one and the oldest comments appear as page n?

NO! I hate that. I hate having to scroll all the way to the back of a topic if I want to catch up.
VaWolf82 05/12/2009 at 10:45 AM #

Would it help to reverse the order of the comments? Have the latest comments appear as page one and the oldest comments appear as page n?

No. I hate reading “up” the page.

Though it would be nice to know which html tags still work…because I just found out the blockquote doesn’t work anymore (but italics or i still does).
StateFans 05/12/2009 at 11:20 AM #

Set it to 20 comments per page?
ruffles31 05/12/2009 at 1:06 PM #

I would prefer to keep the reading the comments from the beginning to end. Also, I would like to increase the comments. Either 20 or 25 would be good. I think that is a good medium for bandwidth vs. page views.
Noah 05/12/2009 at 1:11 PM #

A lot of blogs allow the user to set the number…so if you want to read 10 at a time you can, if you want to see them all, you can.

Is that not a possibility?
o3strategies 05/12/2009 at 1:23 PM #

I bumped it to 25 comments per page.

We’re probably not going to explore comment numbers defined by users at this time. We’ve got a lot of other features in the works that I’m sure will be worth the minor inconvenience of wading through a few pages to read comments.
CannonballJunior 05/12/2009 at 2:27 PM #

Looks great – very good job!
highstick 05/12/2009 at 10:26 PM #

That helps, I think.
NCMike 05/13/2009 at 9:55 AM #

Good job Dustin (or Golddust).