Over the course of the previous fortnight's iteration, we've had a fair few changes take place to the site. We've launched our new music artist pages (for example, our page about Jay-Z) as well as all the usual development work that goes towards making the site what it is.
A new data scraper for the Global Development site
On our Global Development area of the site, we have a lovely searchable data store, allowing users to find information on a range of topics and from a variety of different sources. We've now started to scrape the data from The World Bank in order to improve the comprehensiveness of our data store.
Counting clicks on carousels
Previously, we had no way of being able to measure user interactions with the elements on some of our pages. For example, tracking when people clicked on image carousels and tabs. Now that we have added this, we can track and improve the way users use some of the different components we have on our pages.
Change to social media sharing buttons on content pages
Since Yahoo! Buzz has closed down we've removed the icon from all our content pages and we had to make a slight change to the Reddit badge in it's place.
Improvements to the bento box
When we have a big news event to cover on the site we like to tailor our homepage towards providing a comprehensive stop for that story. One of the components we use is known as the bento box. You will have seen this during our coverage of the royal wedding and the recent Sarah Palin emails. Now we've added the ability to use mini galleries, video and audio content within the bento box.
Making the zeitgeist component fit into our different templates
As some of our pages can often be stretched in length by the number of components placed in the right hand column, we've started to make some adjustments to compensate for this. One of these changes is to our most viewed/zeitgeist component so that it can be placed in different columns. This will go some way towards reducing the length of some of the pages around the site.
