Since Antipode launched two months ago, I’ve been slowly improving things as I go and get feedback. At first the changes were cosmetic. I quickly made the “floating” header stationary, particularly when I realized it interferes with the footnote links I love so much. I improved all the navigation stuff in the sidebar, and then revamped the layout of posts on the main page (especially dates and tags.)
Then I went into a phase of obsessing about how many people were reading. Feedburner now hosts the RSS feed, and are doing a great job. They give a lot of options for stats and feed manipulation, and give me positive feedback when more people subscribe to my feed. ((Supposedly there are 35 of you. Of course, some might be subscribed but are just skipping my posts when they come up… hey, I saw that you! Come back and read this!)) I also installed a Related Posts plugin that works off of the tags, and I’ve been quite happy with its behaviour. There are lots of other tiny changes like this ((For example, I now give a little description for articles’ images. This was inspired by xkcd’s practice of doing this, but I am much less funny.)).
The most important change, I think, has been the mixing commented links in with the articles. I think it’s been working well, allowing me to bring attention to things that I might only have a brief comment on, or follow up on a topic I’d written about before. Also, it lets me keep in the action even when I don’t have the time to write a full article, as during these last two weeks of final exams.
What do you readers think? Are the links useful? Is the pace good?