You might’ve noticed, we’ve been busy making some changes to our home page.
If the page looks a wee bit fuller than usual, that’s because we’ve added some features we’re hoping you’ll find useful. In fact, placing all the new content we’ve added has required a whole new column, which you can see immediately to the right of this article–if you’re reading it on our home page and not on the single article page.
Here’s a rundown of the new features we’ve added:
- We’re now displaying our latest FOSS Force Poll right on the home page. We’ll continue to place our polls within selected articles as always, but now you’ll be able to find our latest poll right at the top of our home page. How’s that for convenience?
- Immediately below our poll is a listing of Upcoming Events from our all new Events Calendar, a new feature we’re very excited about. You can access our calendar either by clicking on one of the upcoming items, or by using the calendar link on the menu bar at the top of the page, just below the FOSS Force logo. We’ll use the Events Calendar to keep you informed on Linux and free software events around the globe.
- If you’re like us, sometimes reading the comments to an article is more fun and insightful than reading the article itself–especially on FOSS sites like ours where the readership can be extremely well-informed and witty. To make sure you don’t miss out, we’re supplying a list of our most Recent Comments right here on our home page. We hope you find this useful.
- Our Twitter Feed is now displayed on our home page. If you’re interested in news about FOSS, open source, Linux or anything else connected with free tech, you’ll want to keep an eye on our feed. Each day we search the web, looking for stories to pass on to you. The feed running here on the home page is completely interactive, meaning you can Reply, Retweet and Favorite right from our site. Enjoy!
- We’re also expanding our Blogroll, which has resulted in us having to reformat the feature. We want to tell you about all the great FOSS sites we find as we roam the net, but we didn’t want to take-up a whole column or more listing them. Our solution was to take a round-robin approach, displaying eight or so randomly selected links from our Blogroll database every time the home page displays. This way you can see new great links from our Blogroll each and every time you visit our site.
None of this will intrude on your experience as you read the articles and essays we publish. On our single article pages, the new column of features will not display and the site will still employ our traditional three column configuration–so you can read without distraction.
We hope you like our new home page layout! Please don’t hesitate to let us know what you think by leaving a comment.
Editor’s note: This post was updated on Tuesday 5/21/13 at 12:30 pm to add Twitter functionality being added to our home page.
