Well, school is out for the duration and there is not a lot of news flowing across the wires. We would like some of this down-time and point out some of the new wrinkles we have added to make things more fun and interesting here in S&P-land.
- The Flickr badge in the sidebar points to a pooled collection of photos by and about Sig Eps. The pics are randomly displayed with new ones every time you refresh. We have wanted a way to show pictures for a while. The pool concept lets many people share their photos together. If you a)have a Flickr account and b)have some Sig Ep pics you would like to share contact wordjunky or one of the pool administators and lets grow the pool.
- Technorati is a collection of web pages and blogs that in indexed in near real-time so that you can see new entries practically as they happen. The tags we have started adding to our posts are indexed into Tecnorati to make S&P easier to find for the casual browser.
- Google Analytics is an under-the-hood feature we have begun to use. It is a full featured tool that can be used on any site to track hits, unique visits, traffic to specific pages, and so on. They used to charge for it but now have made it available to all. You won't see it , but it will help us to determine how well we are feeding the interest of our readers. (We are keeping "sitemeter" as our "official counter" though.)
All of these tools and features are really intended to do one thing...keep you coming back. A very web-wise man pointed out that if you want people to come back, you have to send them away. So we keep looking to figure out interesting ways to link up with other aggregations of material that is in some way "about Sig Ep." If you know of some, pass it on. If you have a website - blog or not - link to us and let us know. We will do our best to get it on the blogroll.
Another idea we are working on is leveraging some of the innovations found in the many excellent chapter sites and create a "best practices" document that chapters can use for pointers when creating or updating a web site. But that is down the road a bit from here.
Keep coming back. As always mail and comments are welcome.
Oh, by the way - have a Grand Solstice.
