I’m really excited (really really excited) about this. Today we find ourselves 11.5 years into this experiment with 3,261 posts, 30,331 approved comments, 880 tags and 30 authors. The main goal with this update is to find ways to highlight and make browsing this substantial content archive a little easier.
- We now have individual author pages. If you are interested in a voice it’s ridiculously easy to find out a little something about that person and browse their entire post history. The old site didn’t even have a full author list so just this is huge progress.
- In addition to boring linear date-based archives (which are now beautiful, readable, and navigable—you’re welcome), we have topic browsing. Those word clouds are massive and overpowering but it’s kind of fun to scroll until your eye catches an interesting phrase and then click to enjoy a curated list of articles for each tag/category.
- Now that we have an integrated single stream database (thank you, sir), we finally have a full site search that actually works, with results sorted by a relevancy score and displayed in a readable style that highlights search terms.
- We’re trying out some experimental community tools. There is now a commenter history page showing individual’s recent comments. ACW has never had verified accounts for commenters so this implementation is highly imprecise and imperfect, but I still think it’s useful and interesting. Additionally, we now have the ability to subscribe to comments and blog posts to get email on updates. And finally, there’s an option to use twitter/facebook/wordpress/google persistent logins to post (or just continue filling in name/email each time).
- The ACW podcast is great and now we have better on-site podcast promotion that includes playing/browsing latest shows as well as full description and discussion links from every episode.
- We’ve built a responsive site redesign that’s looking great on all screen resolutions — including mobile. Wonk4 is a minimal abstraction of everything I loved about Wonk3 with an eye for an ultra clean layout, a front page news style display for quicker fast-digest of recent content, and better typography for readability. This version features a new logo by one of Jeffrey’s favorite artists, Craig Robinson. He created a beautiful abstraction of the Nuclear Effects Bomb Computer—a long-time site icon here at ACW. And, as always, signature author caricatures by José Ramos.
- And finally, there are a million little tiny micro-adjustments and details that no one will ever notice. But I’ll know, and that’s all that matters.
The end (if things break or if you have feature requests please let us know in the comments).