From what I've seen so far, I'm pretty excited about the new Neatorama! Yes, there are quite a few bugs still to be worked out, and we thank you for helping us identify them. Still, I have access to the back end and some of the plans of things yet to be rolled out, and when everything is launched and working it will be awesome! If you haven't taken a good look around, be sure to read Alex's tour of the new site, in which he introduces some new features you can try out. If you run into something that doesn't work as it should, let us know at bugs@neatorama.com. Our engineer Rommel (pictured below) has worked his butt off and is still at it, fixing the glitches one by one. Posting may be a little light for a few days while that happens. After all, he needs to sleep a few hours a day! Oh yeah, there are a lot of comments from the old site yet to be imported. That will take a while, and it's not top priority, but they will get here eventually. Meanwhile, you might find what you're looking for in the FAQ page.
Alex rightly gave Rommel credit for putting this new site together, but you should also know that Alex has been working on it for months, putting his vision to work. Several other sites had notorious redesigns in the past couple of years that didn't get a great reception from users (cough, cough). The redesign here at Neatorama is focused on you, the user. The new features have several purposes, mainly to 1. making reading the site easy and pleasant for everyone, and 2. make it interactive for those who want to participate in the Neatorama community.
This weekly column of mine normally goes up on Saturday, but that was the time we were just waiting for the new site to launch. Sunday I was busy figuring out how to use it. But I still want to remind you of the great features we put up last week in case you missed them. They will eventually go into the archives that we call The Best of Neatorama, which hasn't yet been imported to the new site, but will be here eventually.
Have you seen the remake of Total Recall in theaters now? Jill Harness got you ready for it with a look at the original novel and the first movie version in Things to Recall About Total Recall.
July 31st was Mutt day, so Jill posted a tribute to Meet The Most Famous Mutts Ever.
Eddie Deezen looked back at a great movie, Mel Brook’s Comic Masterpiece: Young Frankenstein.
In After the Olympics, Uncle John's Bathroom reader told us what happened to some of the biggest Olympics stars of the past.
Mental_floss magazine gave us the lowdown on 3 Historical Food Fights.
On the Existence of Mikhailov was a bit of silliness from the Annals of Improbable Research.
And contests! Boy, do we have contests! Congratulations to the Tokyoflash Treasure Hunt #21 Winners.
And here's a Neatorama Caption Contest: The Reading Chipmunk. Still open for your caption contribution, until we find time to finish it up!
In the What Is It? game, the mystery item is a rope winder from a hardware store, it was expanded to the appropriate size and then rope was wrapped around it, the parts were then collapsed and the customer was left with a coil of rope. The first correct answer came from anonymous coward, who requested a donation to an animal shelter in lieu of a t-shirt. There were a lot of wonderful funny answers (you should read them all), but the prize for that goes to Phil and Buster, who said this is a tool for centering the hole in donuts. That's worth a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! Thanks to everyone who played, and check out the answers to all of this week's mystery objects at the What Is It? blog.
The post with the most comments last week was 6-Year-Old Gives 10 Reasons Not to Vote for Obama, which isn't at all surprising. That is followed by Alex's welcome tour of the new Neatorama, which is still gathering comments.
All of our regular social networking sites are still there as they always are, but the links to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and G+ have all moved down to the bottom of the main page. Join us on your favorite social site for further discussions and fun stuff you won't find here! And again, thanks for your patience while we fix things up. Like I said, when all the new features are rolled out, it's going to be awesome!
Nice work, Rommel =]