New features, new (old) design for The Batavian

Some of you have already noticed the site color has changed. 

Those of you familiar with the first three months or so of The Batavian's existence will recognize this site design. It's what we started with.  It was a default theme for the content management system we use and never intended to be a long-term site design.  For various reasons, however, we haven't yet been able to invest in a formal redesign of the site.  As a stop-gap, I went out and found that black-based theme and liked it at first.

But we all grew tired of it pretty quickly.  We always got a few complaints about it being hard to read, especially the links in the right and left columns.  But because the site had grown so much, we couldn't just switch back without some effort.  We're making that switch now.  There's still some kinks to work out, but we're not going back to black.

Eventually, we'll come up with some snazzy redesign and stick with that for a while.

There's also been a couple of other site upgrades that you may have noticed over the past couple of weeks.

First, if you go to the People page now, you'll notice that for any member of the site who isn't your "Friend" yet, you will see a link that says "Add as a Friend."  This will help you better identify people whom you know and should be on your friends list, or people you would like to know.

When people are on your friends list, it makes it easier, through the "Friend Feed" on the left side of the page or your own profile page, to follow their contributions to the site.

Second big upgrade is a new photo sharing tool.  Now you can have, essentially, your own photo blog on the site.  You can upload as many photos as you like. 

To add a photo, click "Create Content" and then "Share Photos." The process for adding a photo should be pretty self-explanatory, but let us know if you have problems.

Unlike adding a photo to a blog post, which requires you to manually resize the photos, you can now upload photos just as they come out of your camera (if you like) and our software will automatically resize the photos for you.  You can also use this feature to upload photos that you plan to use in a blog post. There is now a button on the blog entry form to allow you to easily navigate to your own photos, find the photo you want to use and add it to your post.

As always, we will continue to work on expanding and improving The Batavian.

UPDATE: I forget to mention: If the new template seems faster: It is.  The code is a little cleaner than the old template, plus we made some other performance enhancements to the software and the server.