New Layout Design and Some Housekeeping Items

Happy Neil Year!

Whew. If 2010 turns out to be half as fun as 2009, then we're in for another great year.

In the meantime, a few housekeeping items around here at Thrasher's Wheat.

As you can see, we've got a new look. Adding the third column will give us more flexibility with the sidebars. The single sidebar had become quite unwieldy and we've been meaning to deal with it for quite some time but never could pull it together. Frankly, adding that extra column turned out to quite a challenge to make work right. So hopefully it'll be OK as we shake it down.

Here's a few TW navigation tips. If you are viewing this page in the main news view (http://www.thrasherswheat.org/wheatfield.html) and you need the actual post permalink, it can be found in the footer of each post in the time/date stamp. Post titles will no longer contain the manually loaded URL's of the primary link.

If you're looking for older posts, you can always search the site in the middle sidebar search box. Also, posts are archived in the menu titled "News Archives" just below Recent Posts list.

We added a PostRank widget in the sidebar which we've found to be an interesting little tool. The PostRank widget scores each post based on several factors including reader engagement. Why this matters is that ranking systems have generally relied solely on click volume traffic only. Reader engagement is now emerging has the next measurement trend which indexes comment volume, re-tweeting, Facebook shares and likes, and other similar social networking behavior.

So if you see something you like on TW, comment, tweet, share, etc.

We had an email outage in the 1/1 - 2/10 (Fri.-Sat.) period. So if you sent something, please re-send. Thanks and sorry for trouble.

Lastly, thanks to all who helped vote us to be the January 2010 Rustie of the Month! We're honored.