If you’re a regular visitor to freakytrigger.co.uk, you’ll certainly have noticed that things look different today. The lovely new design – by Stainless Steve Mannion – is a shiny way of drawing your attention to the changes Awesome Alan Trewartha has been making to the “back end”. (Massive thanks to them both!)
Basically, we’ve switched over from Blogger to WordPress. This is better for tons of reasons – it’s easier to post, you can post in multiple categories, WordPress seems to fuck up less than Blogger did, it’s easier to make your posts look nicer, we can have a proper comments system without horrible spam everywhere, and so on. It also means we can edit special pages for events, club nights, podcasts etc. using the same interface.
But what does it mean for the actual content on the site?
- a de-emphasis on the multiple ‘blogs’ – posts will now be fitted into a number of categories, but the main FT page will show them all, short posts will display in full, and for longer posts there’ll be longer excerpts before you have to click through.
- more posts – I’m feeling pretty inspired by the new interface and that will translate to more content: hopefully it will for our other writers too!
- a wider variety of posts – with new categories we’ve a space to write about anything we want to (including pop music – NYLPM isn’t coming back, but it’s being replaced….)
- a separate page for our Poptimism club night, community and side-projects.
- and much more (as we work out what the interface lets us do)
The core purpose of Freaky Trigger remains intact: it’s a place to write intelligent things about popular and unpopular culture. So these changes aren’t enormous from a reading perspective. But hopefully they’ll be enough to elevate the site from a fondly-remembered bookmark to a daily visit again.
There will be teething problems as we get the old articles imported to WordPress, and as we tinker with the special sections like Popular – so please comment or email if you have any issues or suggestions.
Hope you enjoy the new-look site!