As you may have noticed, SpokenWeb 2.0 has a new design! I’ve worked hard to make a simple, elegant design, and of course I’m happy to hear about complaints, suggestions, annoyances, etc. Here’s a quick overview of the changes:

• Pagination now works on the Blog, and you can browse blog categories as well as monthly archives.
• Search has been improved and should now return better results.
• The About page shows up on the front page, and has been removed from the top-level site navigation.
• The login screen has been redesigned to fit better with the theme.
• The backend WordPress installation has been updated to the latest version (version 3.2.1) and all the plugins have been updated.
• I’ve been hard at work reading SoundCloud API documentation to customize the (already) custom SoundCloud player that they provide on GitHub. I’ll get in contact with their developers as I still have a few questions.
• The player is now entirely HTML5 based, so it will work on mobile devices. Timestamps provided in the Transcript and List of Poems Read sections will now work, but please wait until the track has fully buffered to ensure that it works.
• You can pause/play the track anywhere on the page by pressing p.
• The Audio Archives and SGW Poetry Readings index pages have been improved. The tables can now be filtered on-the-fly by typing in search terms in the Filter box. Like before, you can sort the data up and down using the table headers. I’m happy to know if adding in more columns would be helpful.

Annie, the surveys are good to go, as well. The SurveyGizmo devs re-wrote some of their Javascript, so I changed the embed code to an iframe, which unfortunately means that there has to be 2 scroll bars (i.e. a window within a window.) Hope this is not too big of an inconvenience…

That’s all for now!

Update 1

Oops, I might have chosen the wrong time to blog about the new changes as SoundCloud is currently down! This is the first time (that I’ve noticed) that the service goes down. Let’s hope this doesn’t last.

UPDATE 2

SoundCloud is back!