Thoughts.

As of this posting, I’ve said my final farewells at my schools here (FYI–I’ve been teaching in Japan this past year), and currently it’s a whirlwind until I arrive back home in the US on the 24th (and still a whirlwind after that as I’ve got a wedding to attend and Med School starting within 10 days of my return).

I’ve got a post scheduled for tomorrow, but following that I may need to shift to a more irregular posting pattern. This mind doesn’t stop running though, so no guarantees. I WILL keep updating; if I run out of steam on general ultimate skills posts, I will at least be keeping tabs on the NE college and club scene once I’m back coaching/playing in it, respectively. (Incidentally, anybody looking for a writer to report on the NE open [college] scene should give me a holler).

In other news, I made some more minor changes to the site layout:

• Changed the code a bit such that the sidebar widgets aren’t collapseable/expandable, save the archive–Seems like it’s not made a difference in site usability, and it should boost load time to have less javascript.
• Re-worked the links so they’re somewhat categorized. I plan to review and add some more ultimate links and such soon, if I haven’t already as of this posting.
• Got rid of the “Related Posts” widget at the bottom of posts–being collapsed on page load meant nobody used it, and expanded it took up too much space. I’m in the market for a more compact/appealing solution, ideally one that factors in page relevance beyond categories (ie, post content). Any suggestions?  I’ve considered moving to wordpress just for this, but it’s a huge hassle.
• Added an e-mail update link to the subscription links at the bottom of the sidebar, courtesy of feedburner (no spam, just my updates); I’ll be updating the very top bar with this link too, as soon as I find a good e-mail icon for it.  Not everyone can be RSS-savvy (or wants to be, rather).
• Still trying to come up with a good fourth category in the top navbar–fitness, offense, and defense are all broad and have nice sub-categories (check the sidebar when you’re on a given category’s page), but there’s no similarly neat fourth category. I went with “strategy” for a while, but that overlaps with O and D too much, then “mental,” (as in mental aspects of playing), but it doesn’t get a ton of interest in terms of clicks (thank you, google analytics’ site overlay feature). I’ve gone with “inner” which is still “mental” but doesn’t sound as stupid, maybe. What would you put in the navbar out of all the labels I use?  Should I just make an “other” label for stuff that doesn’t fall under the first three and then subdivide within that?

I’d love to hear your ideas on ways to make the site more usable, don’t be afraid to comment or email if you’ve any suggestions.

Related posts:

1. The UPA In Blog Form, or: Why Their Site Needs An Overhaul