Touring the New Digs

No, not Citi Field. That’s so last decade.

We seem to be fairly well settled in to our new Web home (many thanks to John Keegan for his help and for answering a million questions), so I thought I’d offer a quick tour of the new stuff and talk a bit about where we’re going. The idea isn’t to brag, but to get your help with identifying what’s not quite working and what could work better.

Here are some things we’ve added:

New Comment Features — You can now have your own picture or avatar, via gravatar.com — if you sign up there with the email address you used here, your picture should show up here after a few minutes. (Same for any other site on which you have a Gravatar.) You can now edit your comments for 30 minutes, request that a comment be deleted, and edit your email address and any linked URLs. You can also use URLs and other markup in comments, though be aware that too many URLs will trip our spam filter and get a comment stuck in moderation until we can rescue it.

Sharing Tools — Next to the Comment icon/counter you’ll see icons for sharing a post via email or on Facebook, Twitter, Digg or Delicious.

Print Tools — Reading Faith and Fear on the go? This will format it nicely to be printed.

Tags — We’re just starting to play with these, and resisting the urge to go back through 3,000 posts and tag every single one of them to within an inch of its life. (You might have noticed we’re a bit obsessive.) As we build out our tags we hope this will become an easy way to trace, say, all the mean things we say about Luis Castillo.

Mobile Support — Faith and Fear should now automatically format itself to look friendly on an iPhone, Blackberry, etc.

Kindle — Got a Kindle? You can read us on it for 99 cents a month.

And here are some things we’re still working on/thinking about:

More Comment Tools — We’re looking at supporting Facebook Connect for easier commenting, and more ways to build out our discussions. If you’ve got ideas, we’re all ears.

Galleries — We’re still looking around for an easy gallery tool like the one we had with Blogharbor. Many thanks to my partner, by the way, for resurrecting as many of the old site’s photos as he could.

Redesign — For now we just wanted to get the blog over onto WordPress more or less intact. Looking ahead, we’re going to make some design/layout changes, without messing with the overall look. (You know what a pain it is to figure out the Pantone colors for Mets blue and orange and then convert them to hex? No way am I revisiting that.) The goals are to get more useful information up higher (we’ve now got a right-hand column we’re not using) and more blog posts visible without a ton of scrolling. Another thing that will never change is our favicon. Mini-Shea forever!

Ads — As we said in our fall survey (thanks again to all of you who answered our questions), we intend to put ads on the site sometime this year. We’re going to go slow in hopes of getting our sea legs and figuring out what we’re doing. Anyway, stay tuned.

That’s where we are right now. If you’ve got ideas for things you’d like to see or suggestions for widgets/plugins/etc. that would make Faith and Fear work better, we’d love to hear from you in the comments or via email. Thanks for your patience with the technological bumps and the construction dust — we very much appreciate your reading and commenting, and look forward to chronicling 2010.