Hello Neatoramanauts! I'm sure you've been noticing a lot of changes on the blog recently so I'd like to take a moment to update you all about what's happening:
New Layout
Neatorama and NeatoBambino
got new layouts, with cool footer art by one of our favorite artists,
Adam "Ape Lad" Koford.
Check out the bottom part of the blog for larger versions.
The Best of Neatorama
You'd probably be surprised to learn that we have an archive of more than 900 featured articles, including syndicated content from mental_floss and Bathroom Readers. Now, there's an easy way to browse these articles chronologically at the Best of Neatorama.
Farewell to NeatoGeek
In a short period of time, NeatoGeek
has become one of my favorite things about Neatorama (where else could
you read about The
Value of Enterprise in the Star Trek Canon?), thanks mostly to
John Farrier's hard work, so it was a very difficult decision for me to
discontinue the sub-blog. Ultimately, the reason came down to cost.
Discontinuation of the Upcoming Queue
We're also saying goodbye to the Neatorama Upcoming
Queue. While the UQ was the source of many neat and interesting posts,
it took quite a bit of manpower to combat spammers.
On Starting New Projects
In a few short years, the blogosphere has changed a lot. When
we first started in 2005, there were a lot of indie bloggers in the Technorati
Top 100. Now, most of them are corporate-backed blogs and Neatorama
is but one of a handful large indie bloggers still around.
So we have to be creative and nimble: we helped develop an infrastructure to create sub-blogs within WordPress (WP-Hive by John Sessford), created a crowdsourced blog post submission process (the Upcoming Queue), and started an online store (the NeatoShop). Undoubtedly, some of these won't work - but that should not and will not stop us from trying new things.
NeatoHub
Talking about new projects, the NeatoHub
is one I'm very excited about. It's a very similar concept to web rings
(remember those from the early days of the web?) - basically, it's a way
for bloggers to get exposure to a wider audience by joining a network
of bloggers that display each other's best posts to viewers of the entire
network through widgets like you see at the footer of this blog.
The NeatoHub is only a few weeks old, but it has already a significant traffic drivers for its members. The Hub is in private beta right now, but if you're interested in learning more about it (or noticed something's not working right with the new layout), please feel free to email me.
It seems these "hubs" have been popping up a lot as of late, and I personally find them annoying. I click on a link for a story, which doesn't take me to the story, but launches a new tab/window with yet another link to the story (along with several others). I then have to click on the link again, which launches yet another tab/window, finally with the story.
It's as if the Web has taken a step back in usability.
When I get stuck in the loop I tend to lose respect for any site linked in since I always thought the "hub" was only about misdirecting people into advertising links.
So hubs aren't just about advertising space? They are to help small blogs get bigger? (which I guess is still advertising, but not the kind I hate)
One thing I'd love to see, (if you're looking for ideas). Amazon has this great feature where you can be notified of additional posts on a particular item. I'd like to see something similar here because I'm always interested in keeping up with some of the posts in which I comment. Don't know if it can be done, but would be fun if it could.
My curiosity goes on the trafic history of the website : how many passengers do you carry now Alex?
Keep up the good work ;)
@Edward - Thank you for your input! We always try to listen and implement whenever we can.
@Wes and Lucky - There are quite a bit of these "hubs" floating around the Web. What makes the NeatoHub special is that we limit participation to good blogs and websites, so no spammy links.
Funny how some people complain that links open in new tabs - that's actually the number one request whenever we solicit improvement ideas for the blog!
@Fran - We do have comment RSS on individual posts, if that's what you mean. I don't know if there's a way to do mark if a post itself has been updated.
@Christophe - we had about 32 million visits last year. Not so bad for lil' Neato :)
When I see a story I want it to link directly to that story. I do not want link to link to link....I lose interest if I have to click a link for a story more than twice. if it was really an exciting or neat story that you would want people to see, you would link it straight.
As for people requesting that links open in new tabs - I guess that they just have not learned how to right click and "open in new tab" .