As you sit down for another glorious day of tech news and analysis from ReadWriteWeb, you may have noticed that we’ve given our homepage and other aspects of the site a spiffy new upgrade. For many weeks we’ve been thinking of (and coding) better ways to deliver our content to you, as well as a better way to engage and discuss that content. We’re please to officially debut those improvements today! We’ve written this handy overview of what you see.
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Better optimization for timely and popular stories
Whether a story is hot off the wire or just plain hot, you’ll know it with our special new “Top Story”, “Breaking” and ‘Featured” badges.
New story capsules
Right below the first story on the RWW homepage, you’ll see a much-improved visual capsule featuring some of our newest and most popular stories. Sharp!
More sharing options
In the example below, you’ll notice that there are now sharing options available to you in the post preview. For our main channel stories, we’re including the latest share buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and our newest addition, StumbleUpon. For our six additional content channels, we’ll be experiementing with new share buttons from popular tech sites including Reddit and Hacker News. On the bottom of each story, you have additional sharing choices available including email, print, and additional ShareThis options. We’ll be constantly monitoring the performance of each service and adjust the buttons based on what our community interacts with the most.
Introducing Disqus commenting
This is huge. After getting by for a long time on Movable Type’s native commenting, we’re thrilled to be launching Disqus site-wide today. In the short few weeks that Disqus has been running in beta on some of our content channels, the increase in conversation has been evident. The even better news is that since we’re running the VIP version of Disqus, we have an arsenal of tools that will make the experience even better, including rich analytics and insights that will help us better understand how you consume and interact with our stories. We’ll also have the ability to really pimp the aesthetics. What you’re seeing now is a fairly out-of-the-box Disqus implementation, but in the coming weeks you’ll start noticing very cool tweaks and hacks.
In the meantime, we encourage you to take full advantage by logging in with your Disqus account or through one of the many authentication options including Twitter, Facebook and OpenID. Beginning in 2011, we’re going to begin showcasing our most active community members in all kinds of fun ways. So while you’ll still be able to comment anonymously, having a commenting identity (complete with a snazzy avatar) will definitely have its advantages.
More cowbell coming!
While everyone here is excited about today’s launch of new features, what you’re seeing is only phase one. We’d love your feedback on this round of enhancements, and if you’ve got suggestions for future ones, please leave them in the comments.
A big thank you to our tech team for making this all happen!
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