Fingers-crossed, next Friday morning, when you wake up, you'll see a brand new DTN, complete with new-fangled buttons and whistles. I've been messing around with quite a bit of the features behind the scene, but thought that I'd talk a little bit about what you might expect and why the upgrade to SB Nation 2.0 is going to be awesome.
- Auto-Refreshing Comments: Think about this for a second, you will no longer have to refresh you page to see a new comment. It happens like internet magic. Somehow the SB Nation tech guys have sprinkled pixsy dust on everyone's computer and these comments pop up like no one's business. To see for yourself, join a blog of a baseball team that you enjoy and sit in a game day thread. I think you'll be amazed as to how quickly this works.
- Read Comments Without A Mouse: If I'm working at the the computer, I'd prefer to have the hands on the keyboard. I feel like I'm a faster typer than a mouserer. Thus, a cool feature is that you can scroll through a comment by just hitting the "Z" key and it marks the comment as read and replying to a comment is easy as hitting the "R" key, typing in a comment, tabbing a few times and you're done. The other cool part is that the page never re-loads. Again, pixsy dust.
- Tags: Previously, the only way to organize stories at DTN was to label them as football, basketball, baseball, news, etc., which always seemed like a very inefficient way to know what an entry is about. Thankfully, we're going to have tags to help us organize how stories are searched. Thus, if there's a story with Mr. Crabtree, Harrell and Leach, I'll add tags for all three players, with commas separating the tags. Let's also say that a DTN reader finds a cool YouTube video of Mr. Crabtree so they post it to a FanShot (more on that later) and tag it as "Michael Crabtree" and some other user finds a quick chat transcript about how Michael Crabtree might not go in the draft at all because it would be too much of an unfair advantage for all of the other NFL teams who don't get to draft him, and it's tagged "Michael Crabtree". When you search for Michael Crabtree, you're going to find all of that information right at your fingertips, literally. It's going to be beautiful.
- FanPosts v. FanShots: FanPosts are diaries, it's just that they've been re-named FanPosts. These are intended to be your more thoughtful items, something you put a little work into rather than a quick link. FanShots are links, quick quotes, videos, pictures, or a list that you can quickly post to DTN. Doesn't have to be much content with FanShots, just quick-hitters. There's also a bookmarket that you left-click on once, and then drag it to your bookmarks browser. If you run across something that you think would be a perfect fit at DTN, you hit that bookmarklet and, with internet pixsy dust, it fills in most of the items, you tell it to which blog you want to send it to, tag it, hit post and you're on your way. I also believe you can highlight text, hit the bookmarklet, etc., and it' will format it in blockquotes. The FanShots are the quick articles that you find, but don't know where to post them because it's not really an entire FanPost worth of material.
- Gameday Open Threads: I mentioned in the very first point that the comments will automatically appear. I'd love for you to just consider how great this is going to be when the action is happening quickly during a game, you'll be able to post a quick thought without having to constantly refresh your browser. My sports-pants are going crazy.