Facebook Connect

Signing up for a new account with every website you visit can be a tedious affair and when you are only registering to make a comment, sometimes it seems easier to just not bother. Well we completely agree so we have implemented Facebook’s excellent single-sign on solution ‘Facebook Connect’, now instead of registering for an account with Digital Fusion (which you are still more than welcome to do if you wish) you can just login via Facebook and your account will be created automatically.  Now getting to the comment form is a quick and simple affair.

Friendly URL’s

When we initially put the site online we were completely focused on the content, after a few weeks of getting over excited about how cool it all was we realised that our site structure was not all that user friendly. So with that in mind we have completely changed our linking structure. Instead of typing a long and boring URL with numbers and query strings etc... to get to this article you can just type:

http://www.digitalfusionmag.com/blog/news/digital-fusion-magazine-latest-updates

This works with profiles as well so if you register with our site (or use Facebook Connect) you will get your own static profile url which is nice and easy to remember (for example mine is: http://www.digitalfusionmag.com/users/alexward1981)

RSS Feeds

To be honest these were here from the start but we have made them a little bit better, firstly we have fully linked them to the site so all feed readers can now see them properly (if you are using Firefox you’ll notice that the address bar has detected the feed). Plus we now have specific feeds for authors and categories which will allow you to filter what articles make it to your reader.

Facebook Fan Page

For those of you who use Facebook (all of you most likely), you will notice that we’ve geared the site to make it easier for you to use.  If you like what you see on our site then you may be interested in our Facebook fan page, sometimes we post snippets on there which do not make it to the site or our twitter feeds. You can get to it by clicking the Facebook logo at the top of the page.

Minor comment changes

The comment box now appears on the article page as well as the comments page making it easier for you to cut-and-paste from the article, also we have restyled the comments slightly to make the separation between comments a little easier on the eyes.

Upcoming changes

We’ve not finished improving the site, not by a long shot, expect to see the following appear on the site in the next few months (possibly weeks)

• Nested comments (Reply-to Poster)
• Private comments system
• Polling System
• Related articles