Hi everyone! I’m very excited to announce the return of two important features to the site, as well as some minor updates. Let’s dig in and talk about why both of these weren’t available initially. I won’t take up too much of your time, so let’s go into rapid fire explanation mode.
Comments
Basically, we didn’t want to rely on the system that WordPress has built-in. Why? Well, honestly, it’s not great for filtering unnecessary spam nor does it have great moderation tools. So we spent some time going back and forth internally on whether or not we’d even launch comments at all. Tyson ultimately pushed me off the fence and convinced me to add them. So we host our comments section through Disqus now! Yay.
Search
When moving from Tumblr to WordPress, we had some issues with Search. I didn’t really feel comfortable adding this feature to site while it was in that state, so I disabled it temporarily. Thankfully, after a few painstaking hours of yelling at it, it now works as intended. Feel free to search to your heart’s content. It’s not Google Custom Search or anything, it’s our own built-in search database, so it’ll be responsive to your queries. We promise.
Quick asides
You might’ve noticed that some things have changed. The “breadcrumbs” above the posts telling you where you were on the site have been removed. People thought they were annoying (in hindsight: we did too) so they’ve been removed.
Additionally, we now have a “Top Stories” section at the top of the homepage. This is basically a spotlight on our reporting and other content we’ve created. We’re very excited to have this as it makes the homepage feel a little more home-y.
We’re still playing around with some things and I’m sure we’ll experiment with some other changes. I’m not ready to talk about what’s next as I’m still waiting on some details, but I think I’ll be back soon with more for you.
Have a wonderful day,
Slade
Editor-in-Chief & Director
Kakariko Herald
