Thoughts.

I’ll try and get some kind of retrospective up before week’s end–we have Friday off from classes for whatever reason (reverse Columbus day?) but a ton of class to make up for it in the first four.

I’ve been limping around since halftime of our backdoor loss to Puppet Saturday. Bursitis of the right knee, methinks. Baller?

More to come later.

Sorry. I’ll try and make it up with something good for Thursday (I’ve got a few posts in the works, but haven’t made time to finish them).

In the meantime, I added a few more links to the sidebar. The Idea of the Day blog is my new favorite daily read.

What’ve you been reading lately, ultimate or otherwise?

I’ll get it out as soon as I can, ideally by this afternoon and pretty definitely by this evening.

In the meantime, I’ll let the results speak for themselves.

The goal will be to have new content every Tuesday at a minimum. This should hopefully give me enough time after weekend tourneys to write up a recap. If I’m doing more than Tuesdays just, Thursday would be another content day, with the rest, likely Mon or Fri, for odds and ends (links about town, blog news posts like this).

Posts will go up at 8AM eastern time when I’m on schedule, as opposed to the prior midnight slot.

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:
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• Updated the popular posts widget–I’ll probably re-up the list every couple weeks to month or so. Still trying to figure out an automatic solution there (one method involves ranking by comment count, but not everything that’s well-read is commented on), so if anybody out there has experience with blogger-powered popular post widgets I’d appreciate hearing from you.

• Updated the label cloud widget; moved it up in the sidebar, set the max text size to be bigger, made it so that fewer labels are displayed. Hopefully this highlights some of the labels that didn’t make the navbar a little better
• The Recent Posts Widget now displays 10 recent posts instead of 5. I had to swap off the blogger widget to do this though…I’m hoping there isn’t a noticeable slowdown for using an off-site one (there are a few already).
• RSS Readers should notice a working comment count feature at the bottom of posts now. Hopefully this helps people keep track of discussions a little more easily. It’ll stay current even if you’ve already read the post (so you can check the count again and again in your reader), though I’m not quite sure what the update frequency is–something around once every 30 minutes from what I can tell.
• I added a few other feedflares too–I’ve noticed a small but significant number of referrals from email apps and facebook, so hopefully those feedflares help expedite that process.

As always, I’m open to feedback.

I added another widget to the sidebar pointing towards the 10 pages that have gotten the most hits over the past 8 months or so (looking at aggregate page view totals from google analytics). It doesn’t account for all the RSS readers out there, and it’s not dynamic–just a static link list, but until I find a better solution I’ll just periodically update the list manually.

Also, because sorting categories the way I envisioned (namely, with tabbed categories and sub-categories, e.g., Offense would have Throwing, Catching, etc as sub-categories) is proving tougher at first shake than I anticipated, I’m shelving that for now and settled for re-instituting the label cloud on the sidebar.

Finally, I added an about page (linked at the very top along with the RSS feed). I’ll let that speak for itself.

Likely won’t have time to play around with any more big changes to the template for at least a few weeks, so what’s here now is more or less it. As usual, would love to hear feedback from you.

Re-did the banner. Gave up on trying for the more artistic angle and settled for simplicity. UPDATE: Max Frie(n)dman, ’10, gave me a little twist on the banner. Check out what he’s done for the Dartmouth team pages.

I may yet change it to reflect my current hair state–I just need a sufficiently good enough ultimate-related picture with the short stuff. Perhaps I’ll be able to remedy that lack this weekend at the Awaji Open.

No passport necessary this time, so though I hesitate to guarantee it, you can expect a tourney recap early next week.