So another month flies past and another major update. We actually pushed this version out a week back but we have been incrementally improving that release and did not want to shout about it until we were happy with all the changes (it was pretty major!).

Front Page Layout

So what have we done? well the core idea behind the changes has been to bring attention to the conversational nature of fav.or.it, this means that in most places we try and show the most popular items in each category next to where all the commenting is happening.

New comment page

This lists all the most recent topics which have had a new comment added, this is great way to get involved in the conversation that is happening now. An example of this can be seen here. This works for either a particular category or even a feed..

Trends

We have also added a ‘trends’ widget on a lot of pages that shows what trends are happening in particular categories. This shows a mini-graph of the last 7 days of traffic for a particular keyword, the keywords themselves are picked based upon their overall movement in the last week (mainly due to them becoming quickly popular).

Reader

We have also disabled the reader, this hopefully will be for a very short space of time but we made some major schema changes and this was in part in readiness to push out a much improved reader but because of those changes we cannot keep the old version running. So lookout for a preview of the new features.

Support

Lastly we have now completed full support of the disqus commenting platform. This means that any blogs we add to our service that use the disqus platform we can still aggregate the comments and push comments back, this also includes the threading of the conversation that disqus supports. We are really happy to have completed this integration and a big thanks to the guys over a disqus for great support making this happen.

As always feedback is most welcome so go check out the new site. Want to give me direct feedback? follow me on twitter.