Welcome to the New ZRecs

Hi there. You may have noticed that we haven't posted anything in, well, two days. We missed you! We hope you can now see why we've been quiet. (If you are one of our growing community of feed and email subscribers, hop on over to Z Recommends to see our extreme makeover - and make sure to read the bottom of this post for an exciting announcement about our new email subscription service.) We've taken the leap to the new Blogger, and we've tried to make the most of the capabilities the upgrade has to offer.

There are a couple of things we're very excited about in the new site beyond the obvious three-column template change.


Search and Find

Between navigation buttons on our blog header and a very cool multi-format label list we hacked out of Hackosphere's already great code (we also based our new template on one of Ramani's), we are playing Blogger's new tagging ("labeling") capability, which means that everything in ZRecs that was once buried in the archives is now at your fingertips, and you can browse the site based on your reading interests. This alone was worth the price of admission to the new Blogger, which was non-fiduciary and involved many, many hours spent fussing with xml templates and trying to piece code together without breaking it.


The Comment Conversation

We're also thrilled about a new feature on our home page which highlights recent comments posted anywhere on our blog. If we hadn't been so disgustingly busy trying to gussy up this site over the past several days, we would have responded to the several generous comments we received, but those comments are now showcased in this sidebar widget, which keeps new comments, even on older posts, in the limelight and helps encourage conversation. We got this widget from Beautiful Beta, which, as I gushed in my link to del.icio.us, is the best Blogger widget site I have seen in two weeks of trolling the Ninternet for such things.

We will be tinkering a bit more with the layout over the next couple of weeks - we've been striving mightily to enable peek-a-boo posts, for example, that allow you to view more on a page and toggle open posts you want to read - but you are now looking at the majority of our upgrade.


New Perks for Email Subscribers

One development I'm very excited about has nothing to do with the new Blogger at all. It's my discovery of FeedBlitz, an email-delivery feed subscription service that lives in the shadow of the ubiquitous FeedBurner. Like FeedBurner, FeedBlitz offers anonymous blog subscriptions (you supply your email address but the "publisher," in this case us, never sees it) but it also allows us to insert messages to our subscribers into our feed. We have been looking for a way to do this for a while, because we have some ideas for how we'd like to engage our audience to encourage subscriptions. Namely, we plan on giving away a great toddler product every month, and on doing some more special things we can't quite talk about yet, in posts sent exclusively to our email subscribers. Better yet, Feedblitz allows subscribers to easily filter their feed based on our post tags (labels) so you could subscribe exclusively to the kinds of posts that interest you - our popular homemade toys, for example, or our toddler book reviews - or, conversely, simply exclude label categories you don't want to see. The signup is on the lefthand sidebar.

If you have considered subscribing to Z Recommends, consider this a great new reason to do so. We will be working with major retailers as well as exciting crafters to bring great products to our monthly giveaways. If you are already subscribed through FeedBurner or a feed reader, we encourage you to consider trying a FeedBlitz email subscription to enjoy these added benefits. We will continue to support FeedBurner feeds and, of course, have a raw RSS/Atom feed available for feed-reader subscriptions.