The New & Improved racketboy.com
Over the past month I’ve been making some investments in improving the organization and functionality of the site. Â I’ve converted all the main content from Blogger to WordPress to offer me more flexibility and features. Â I maintained the overall look and feel of the site, but there are some interesting improvements….
- Real categories to browse
- View older (or newer posts) via “next/previous page” links
- Front page now ties together content from all parts of the site
- Retro News section
- Easier Commenting
- Quicker page rendering
Categories
I’m still in the middle of tagging everything, but you can now easily browse all the different topics of posts to find articles that interest you most. Â There are a number of different option for this…
- These is a drop-down box on the top left-hand side that will list all the categories — choose one and you’ll be whisked away to your topic
- There is a Topics page that is accessible on the top center part of each Retro page
- The categories for a given post are located on the bottom of each post (by the author/date) click on one to see other posts in that same category
Next Page Links
With the old setup, once you reached the end of the main page, there wasn’t an easy way to view the previous posts. Â With the new setup, you now have that option. Â You can browse the main section or the categories with the “Next Page” link at the bottom
New Front Page
For the longest time, I have wanted a cleaner, more professional front page that dynamically updated with all the latest content and discussions from all parts of the site.  The new design does all that in addition to giving new visitors a place to start looking around with the “Most Popular” and  “Topics” tabs
Retro News Section
Since my site is blocked while I’m at work and I don’t have time to write lengthy write-ups on everything that goes on in the retrogaming world, I’ve set up a way for me to use Del.ico.us to tag news stories and interesting links and have them show up in the news section. (the News tab is on the top, center area of the page) Â There is also a dedicated RSS feed for the news for those of you that want to keep up-to-date on all the happenings. Â It is the perfect compliment to my normal RetroGaming feed. Â I haven’t decided if I should include a daily summary of the news links on the main retro page/feed. Â Let me know what you think.
Easier Commenting
You don’t have to type a “captcha” any more or click onto a separate page to post comments anymore. Â Wordpress makes it much easier to share your thoughts.
Quicker Page Rendering
This isn’t anything major, Â but now the site is based on more modern HTML and CSS as opposed to my old-school tables-based code.
What the Future Holds
There are other developments in the works for racketboy.com
We may be putting the racketboy wiki into use, but its still in the early stages.
I am also putting down the groundwork for a game database, but you will be hearing more about that later.
What Do You Think?
I’d love to hear your thoughts on these changes and where you would like to see the site go in the future.
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I love it! Wish I could think of something to suggest…. Great work!
Great work… It makes everything much easier to get around, and I’d much rather trust WordPress with a blog than blogger.
I probably said this before, but feel free to give me a shout if you need a hand with WordPress themes or anything 🙂
The Next Page Links are great. I was waiting quite a while for that. If I happen to miss some posts I can easily find them. Excellent.
damn…. i love this website
all the old classic stuff are here!!!
and now its new & improved!!!
yeah!!
ps: yes, i agree that the “next page’ link is most helpful.
Oh, noooo…
Blogger vs WP, ¿Better?
I’m still using blogger (with hacks).