Site Upgrades

In the very near future, AA will be going through some site upgrades to enhance functionality and usability of the posting/commenting here. Yay! The upgrades have already been guinea-pigged at Athletics Nation and a couple of our college blogs, and AA is at the top of the list of baseball blogs to receive the makeover.

Here are the biggest components of the upgrade:

• Ajax commenting: you will now be able to expand/collapse comments as you see fit. Basically, you can see what you want and hide what you don't.
• Comment auto-refresh: you won't have to press [F5] or refresh the page in order to see new comments on the page; this will be especially helpful during game chatters. The comments are refreshed dynamically and new comments will be indicated as such. This can be disabled on a per user basis if you decide you hate it.
• Ajax editor: the diary posting interface has been beefed up and will be much more impressive and intuitive. Posting will happen much more quickly without having to reload the site.
• Tags: AA authors will now be able to "tag" stories (right now we are limited to a single "Section"). This will allow more elaborate organizing and searching of posts at AA.

If you want to see the new features in action, you can click through to Athletics Nation. As soon as I know the exact date of the change I will let everyone know. The new features may take a few days to get used to, but they will make the site better in the long run.

In addition to the site changes I have added a new "Game Chatter Hitlist" table to the right sidebar. In essence, this table keeps track of user comments during game chatters so everyone knows who is contributing to the game threads. For instance, DocMets16 is pacing the circuit with 88 comments through the first two games. Right on!