On Tuesday, October 7, we rolled out a major release with several important site enhancements.  It has taken a little while for the dust to settle here, so apologies for the delay in the official announcement. 

Here is what is new on thestandard.com:

Story “Carousel”
Across the top of nearly every page on the site, we now have an area directly under the site navigation where we can promote important news and predictions that might otherwise get lost in the shuffle.  The tool is capable of holding an infinite amount of content, but we generally keep ours loaded with about 10 pieces of content.  

Home and News pages
The most obvious update for most users was the new homepage update.  The news stories now all contain graphical components, which are actually attached at the article level, yet used in multiple places (Home, News, Article and Carousel).  This new image system gives our editors much more power to add visual interest to the stories they publish.

We’ve also added the Associated Press as a content partner to add additional scope to our tech coverage.

Article level
As I mentioned earlier, we now have an image system in place that makes adding images to content incredibly easy for our editors.  Any image can be put into an article and it will automatically become resized, and compressed, appropriately.  At the same time, all of the necessary thumbnails are generated on the fly should the article be promoted elsewhere on the site.  And, most importantly, if a user is at the article level and he/she clicks the image, the original will be put into a modal window to allow for closer inspection.  This is especially important for information-rich graphs and charts.

Misc
There was a lot of optimization done under the hood and CSS cleanup, which was unnoticed by 99.9% of our users (the other .01% being ourselves).  Know that we are always striving to optimize and improve the site to ultimately improve everyone's experience.

(photo credit: mugley) 

After a bit of a delay, The Standard’s team blog is finally here.  FTW!

Over the past six months, we have found ourselves time and time again discussing various aspects of the PM (prediction market) with some of our top players.  We never really had a good place to do it, however.  One minute the discussion would cover the intricacies or semantics of, say, jailbreaking an iPhone, the next we would be creating PM wishlists and sharing product enhancement ideas back and forth.

So, until we have a proper forum, right now we’ll be doing a lot of the PM functionality discussions with core users over here.  We really value your feedback and look forward to the future discussions we’ll have.

Also, the Team Blog will be a place where we announce new site features, events, programs, jobs, and other tidbits as they relate to the site, the team, and your experiences at thestandard.com.

Image Credit: NASA