Ever since we relaunched The Hatchet’s blogs in January this year, we’ve been working hard behind the scenes to improve them. Early this week, as some of you might have noticed, we made a few changes and added a few features. Our codebase (source code) has been rewritten, which provides better performance and a lot more flexibility. Some of the specific changes are:

• RSS: We consolidated posts to our blogs into a single RSS feed. We knew how cumbersome multiple RSS feeds were, but our old setup prevents us from combining them easily. And for those of you interested in just news from Newsroom, or sports from Courtside, or any of our other blogs, various separate feeds still exist.
• Design: Some colors changed, ever so slightly. If you didn’t notice, well, I suppose that’s a good thing — after all of the drastic changes we’ve made to our Web site this year, gradual change can be good (the eBay case study is a personal favorite).
• Our bloggers: We updated all of our contributors to reflect our new staff, and with that added author pages.
• On our sidebar: We added a useful search tool, and lists of most the recent posts and comments.
• The storefront: We also added a splash page, at blogs.gwhatchet.com, which gracefully brings our blogs together.

If you have any comments or suggestions, feedback is always welcome: please let us know what you think by posting them here or sending them to [email protected]. And with the summer ahead of us, more new things are in store throughout our Web site, so stay tuned.

If you want to join our staff and have a chance to work on cool projects with high visibility, send me an e-mail.

Andrew Nacin
Web Director, The GW Hatchet