Our work on the new site design continues. I just became aware that the “Email This Post” feature was not working properly.

It has now been fixed and emails are sending as they should be.

Many apologies to those who have attempted to email posts in the last week.

Keep an eye out for continued improvements, and let us know of any other glitches you may find.

Looking at our visitor statistics, we note that roughly 40% of our readers are first timers. A good portion of these new readers come through Google or Yahoo searches, or from the many placements of our RSS syndication links on bluegrass sites all over the web.

With these numbers in mind, and in response to questions we receive by email, we have decided to post from time to time with information to help new readers take full advantage of the integration and navigational features we use on The Bluegrass Blog. Of course, new readers are always encouraged to visit our New Reader FAQ page, where most any questions that may arise are answered in one place.

Today, we want to talk briefly about Tags – what they are, and how to use them. Tags are like shortcut links to other posts on The Bluegrass Blog that deal with the topic named by the tag. They are typically included just under the post title, one line beneath the post author and date. If you examine the image of a recent post below, you’ll see the tag line, with tags highlighted.

That particular post discussed a YouTube video that featured Jethro Burns performing a talking blues tribute to prominent mandolin players, joined on stage by Red Rector and Bill Monroe. Each of the tags shown (Bill Monroe, Jethro Burns, mandolin, Red Rector, YouTube) would link when clicked in an actual post to all articles we have published about either Bill Monroe, Jethro Burns, mandolin, Red Rector or YouTube.

You’ll notice that this current post has as its tag, About The Bluegrass Blog, and clicking it will display a list of other posts we have tagged that contain information similar to what we have posted here.

We hope that our readers, whether you are new or one of our treasured regulars, will take advantage of tags to find more information of interest here on The Bluegrass Blog.

We just finished the first round of upgrades to the blog. We modifed some code to make things more effecient and easier to use. Most of the changes are unseen and you won’t even notice them, but there is one major enhancement that you might notice.

Those that have posted in our user contribution section known as The B will notice some modifications to the post writing screen. The interface now sports the upgraded visual editor as well as a tab labeled “Code” for those that would prefer to write html code directly. Spell checking is now available as well. Just click on the spell check icon and it will check your draft for errors.

The other big change is the way submissions are handled. Now when you are writing a draft you can save it and come back later to work on it. You’ll see it listed at the top of the page as “Your Drafts:” and can simply click on the post title to begin editing it again. Once completed, the “Submit” button now more effeciently tags the draft as submitted and it will be taken out of your drafts list and forwarded to John and I for approval. This is a huge advancement over the previous system which, I’ll admit, was somewhat confusing.

If you have never posted in The B before, all that is required is a simple registration and you can then submit your own news/opinion items for inclusion in The B.

Join today and help us blog about bluegrass!

This is something new that we’re real excited about. I’ve been delving into rss and javascript and come up with a handy little way for you to paste one line of code into your own website and display the 10 latest headlines from The Bluegrass Blog in a stylish box that reflects the design of this site. Here is an example of what it looks like.

This little thing is pretty flexible and will resize itself to fill whatever space you give it. You’ll want to enclose it inside a tag of some kind that has a fixed width applied to it. A table, div, span, or even p tag will work. If you don’t constrain this thing with a width, it becomes a monster and will fill the whole page. The example to the right is constrained inside a div tag that has a width set to 200 pixels.

John has built a nice page with further explanation of how to implement it. That page contains examples of the Syndibox, that’s my name for it, sized in different ways, along with the code necessary to include it on your page.

Visit the SyndiBox page here.

I’ll just add that if it’s a blog you are running, you can probably just drop the script right into your sidebar and it’ll resize itself to the width of your sidebar.