Happy Niu Year! New Clothes For chinaSMACK

It is common for many Chinese people to have new clothes to celebrate the new year (Chinese Lunar New Year or Spring Festival). Although it is a little really late, chinaSMACK finally has some new clothes for the year of the cow to replace the original design (see right).

Here are some of the new changes and improvements:

Cleaner & More Organized

• Better Home Page: Our new home page features the latest post and the most recent comments. It also provides simple previews for recent content.
• About Section: Learn more information about chinaSMACK in the About menu.
• Category Sections: The category pages are now more organized.
• Author & Contributor Profiles: Learn more about chinaSMACK’s authors and contributors in the new “Authors & Contributors” page or just click on their name when you read one of their posts.

New & Improved Features

• Better Search: Easily search all of chinaSMACK’s posts with our Google Custom Search Engine located in the navigation menu.
• Subscribe to chinaSMACK: You can subscribe to chinaSMACK by RSS or by email. Just click on the two orange links next to the Search.
• Reply Directly to Comments: You can now reply directly to someone’s comment by clicking on “Reply” on the bottom of each comment. This will make it easier to have conversations (or fights).
• Get  a Gravatar: This is not new but I hope more regular visitors will get a Gravatar. It is very simple. Just upload a picture and every time you use your email address in a comment, it will automatically show that picture on many blogs like chinaSMACK. It will make chinaSMACK a little better looking.

Join chinaSMACK

• Become a chinaSMACK Member: You can now join this website and become a member using your Google Yahoo, AIM, or OpenID.
• Add & Invite Friends: After you join chinaSMACK, you can add other members as friends or invite your own friends to come visit chinaSMACK.
• More To Come: In the future, we will add new features or do special things only for chinaSMACK members so please join!

More Coming Soon…

There will probably be some problems that will need to be fixed and there are also more things that have not yet been added yet. I will post new announcements about them later.

I hope everyone likes the new design. Please let me know what you think in the comments.