Nerfbat: The Experimentation Continues

I’m still messing with the page a bit. The changes have basically been made to increase functionality, make it easier for me to work with on the back end, and improve the experience of those who read and comment on the site. Here’s a quick summary of the changes I’ve made that will actually impact you:

• Single pages and posts remove the navigation bar. I like the presentation of this a little better.
• I may have finally figured out why scrolling my site was so slow: the fixed background image. It now scrolls as you move down, which looks less cool, but it’s way faster.
• There is now a Contact Form that you can send mail to instead of directly clicking my name to email me (spam sucks).
• You can now Subscribe to Nerfbat and receive daily emails whenever I write a new post. Go to your Profile to subscribe or head to the Subscription page

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• You can subscribe to a post and receive notifications when a comment is posted. Right now, you have to make a comment in order to subscribe.
• Gravatars are now on in the comments area. I hide them if you don’t have one associated with your email address.
• I fixed the issue with the auto comment preview not putting extra spaces in there when you hit enter twice (current side-effect: if you make a single linebreak, it still shows it with two… not too big a deal).
• There are smiley links just above the comment section that you can click to include in your comments.
• The 10 latest posts on Nerfbat are displayed at the bottom of each post.
• I added a bunch of bookmark type icons to the bottom of posts (there used to be about 5).
• The “Print this post” function has been updated and works a bit nicer… it was a seldom used feature, so it got moved up with the info text under the post.
• Trackbacks automatically add themselves to posts via Technorati. Kinda wonky but I’ll watch it as time goes on to see if I really like it.
• I optimized pretty much all of the images on the site a little further. For example, the middle section of the parchment that tiles is about 1/3 as big as it used to be (physically and byte size).
• The header now has a pretty picture of Grouchy Gnome on it, and I modified the Nerfbat definition so it would fit correctly.
• You can see what category a post is in on the front page now.

Probably not much more experimentation will go on, but there may be a few kinks that I need to work out yet. Feel free to let me know what you think.

Update: Just added some Google ads as an experiment as well to see if it can make enough to pay for the hosting of the site. If not, I’ll ditch them.