TuscanyCircle has undergone some minor changes recently. First, you'll notice the link colors have changed. Next, you should notice that the URL for its "All nodes" feed has changed from http://tuscanycircle.net/node/... to http://tuscanycircle.net/view/.... The former is now named "Front Page" and does not contain all new content but only that which has been promoted to the front pages.

New content used to be automatically promoted to the front page; no more. This is in an effort to create two classes of publishing, one with higher visibility and another with slightly less. For now, I will be the one to do the promotion to the front pages (or demotion off the front pages). This may change in the near future, though, as I would prefer more member participation in this effort. (I need to develop a reasonable process for this.) For now, if you will "flag" any content you wish to see promoted to the front page (old or new), I'll periodically audit the flagged list and promote them (and unflag them at that time). As timely articles age, they'll fall off the front pages. Rest assured, no content is lost just because it's not on the front pages. For starters, a new navigation menu called "everything" has been created, containing all published articles. Of course, content will be under "blogs" or "forums", etc., too--and the major search engines will still find them. If you write an article and do not want it promoted (you want to limit its visibility for some reason), just don't flag it. I'll post again when this promotion process matures to something better.

By now, I'm sure you've noticed the menus have moved a bit. All the menus pertaining to your account are front and center, under the site's title. Most of the items in the navigation menu are now related to--shock!--navigation. There are many ways to view and find content on TuscanyCircle, so this menu has grown rather large, but hopefully you'll find it worthwhile.

You should also notice the news aggregator has been resurrected. Rather than opening it up to members to manage, I'll maintain control over it. This is primarily to limit the number of feeds we aggregate, as it can be resource intensive.

Most moderation has been disabled. Any misfiling of articles (e.g., under a forum rather than a blog), spam, or outright abuses will be handled after the fact. If this becomes cumbersome for me, moderation will be fully enabled on everything--hopefully, we won't need to go there. If an article gets misfiled and I correct it, don't take it personally; the philosophical differences can occasionally be subtle to others. Visibility of your content will not be affected by this.

One annoyance of note: in a recent upgrade of my CMS engine, I used an FTP program to upload (re-upload in most cases) the site. The FTP program was FireFTP, an extension to Firefox. Apparently, this client has bugs when it comes to transferring some graphic formats (e.g., png, gif, jpg), and several pictures and icons became corrupted. If you find any such corruption, please notify me, so I can fix it. I know of several that need reloading, and I'll do so as soon as I find them in my backups. Needless to say, I won't be using FireFTP anymore!

You may also notice the URLs for TuscanyCircle have been shortened, dropping the "drupal/" portion. That was a long-time pain I was glad to shed. Rest assured, though, the old URLs still work, too, so bookmarks and search engine contents aren't adversely affected.

As always, let me know if you have any questions or comments. Enjoy!