We’re still tweaking things at Dangerous Intersection, adding new features, looking at them, and sometimes removing them.   It reminds me of the quote by Oscar Wilde:

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

Instead of commas, though, I’m dealing with WordPress plugins.  It’s an adventure experimenting with these open-source tweaks.  Sometimes they work brilliantly.  Sometimes, they don’t work at all.  Sometimes they cause a “fatal error.”

The good news is that I have successfully installed WordPress 2.71, which allows lots of new features.  I’ve also updated the design template I’m using (to WP-Vybe 1.1).  This combination allows for nested comments.   If you want to reply to a comment rather than to the post itself, you now have that option.   Just look for “reply” attached to each comment.

One of the newer features is “popular posts” (on the left sidebar).   I did want to disclose that this list is computer generated based upon relatively recent page-views.  I don’t tweak that list at all.

Regarding the comments sidebar (right site), I realize that it’s looking a bit raggedy these days.  I’m still working on that.  One cool new feature, however, is that I have downloaded a plug-in that groups the recent comments by post.  If you find one of the posts to be interesting, you can find all of the recent comments regarding that post grouped together (well, up to five of the most recent posts–I wanted to make sure that I left room for the recent comments of multiple posts, even if one of the posts draws an inordinate number of comments.

I’ve heard quite a few comments that this site is often running slowly.  I agree.   We’re going to make some technical adjustments to address that.  I hope to  see an improvement over the next couple of weeks.   In the meantime, you might see that some of our navigation features are somewhat limited.