I just finished a pretty long session or upgrades and improvements to thingelstad.com. Here are some new things to check out.

Gravatars

I actually implemented Gravatars a while back, when Automattic bought them. But it deserves a special highlight and I improved the implementation now. If you comment here, register for a Gravatar so you can get your picture next to your comments!

Feed Improvement

Nothing too big here, but you will now see tags and related article links in the RSS feed. I know a lot of people use that feed exclusively so I think that may prove useful. (Thanks to Simple Tags.)

Ratings

You can now rate all posts on the site using a 5-star scale. You’ll see the rating tool around any posts. Just click to give it a rating. Go ahead and start with this post. Top rated posts are highlighted on the front page. (Thanks to Lester Chan’s WP-PostRatings.)

Articles

I setup an article page on the site where certain posts are highlighted and called out. This allows me to give special positioning to certain things I write. (Thanks to Alex King’s Articles Plug-in.)

Polls

I’ve added polling functionality, which I used to have a long time on my site. It isn’t going to be permanent in the sidebar, but instead just embedded into different posts. (Thanks [again] to Lester Chan’s WP-Polls.)

Theme

The hardest maintenance item you won’t even notice. I updated the theme I use, blog.txt, from 3.1 to 4.1. I don’t think there is any noticeable impact visibly. I had to go in and rehack in all my theme customizations though. I really wish WordPress made that easier. Thanks to Scott Wallick for making such a great theme. I really can’t say enough good things about this theme.

Filling Out Tags

Last is a bunch of manual labor. I’m slowly getting tags applied to my archive. There are hundreds of posts that were made before my blog had tagging. This is getting filled in slowly but surely.

Enjoy the updates!