Shiny

Okay, so it’s not really that shiny. I figured I’d leave the bling to horrendous Bebo skins. But, regardless of that, it’s time to tell you a bit about the recent (as in, over the last few weeks) site upgrade here at ThinkWithPortals.

The most obvious thing that’s changed is the template that we use, but most of you looking at the site now never visited the site in the old days, so this is kind of a moot point. Just so you know, the newer format has a wider space for main blog content, so that means less scrolling for everyone.

The second thing to talk about is the newly-enhanced sidebar. The Playlist and Wishlist sections remain, along with the blog archive, but there are a few new panels to talk about. On top of adding a welcome message for those new to the site, we now have a Twitter account which you can follow either from the sidebar or at http://www.twitter.com/ThinkWithPortal (and no, Twitter had no space for that last ‘s’). The little ‘Featured’ panel that now contains links to our posts on the Eurogamer Expo and our LittleBigPlanet coverage will be updated with what’s hip and happening here on the blog.

We’ve also added a number of new ways to follow the site: we’ve moved our RSS feed over to FeedBurner to make it easier to add our feed to whichever reader you use, and also added a mobile version of the site. Or two to be precise.

Should you have a regular WAP (or similar) phone, you can view all of our posts on the mobile site much quicker than attempting to load the full version. There’s pictures and everything! But should you be using an iPhone, like Farmer Fryingpan’s shiny new one, you should instead go to the special iPhone page, which looks a bit like this:

Here you can view all the same content as the full and mobile versions, just in a snazzier, touch friendly format. Both of those versions are live now using the links in the sidebar (I highly suggest you favourite them on your devices), and I hope to get a redirect up for mobile devices sometime in the near future.

There is, as ever, a lot more behind the scenes in this upgrade which should make the site much more stable, as well as fixing some annoying little bugs, and helping us serve up more awesome gaming goodness.

FO done.