Changes Coming To Capital Gains And Games
March 24th will be CG&G's second anniversary.
Since Andrew, Pete, Troy, and I joined forces two years ago, the country has gone through a financial meltdown and a recession, the first African American was elected president of the United States, the budget debate has become (to put it mildly) extremely bitter, the New York Yankees won the World Series (Sorry Andrew, I had to include that), and the blogosphere has gone mainstream. CG&G has been noticed, noted, cited, and criticized, sometimes all at the same time by the same person.
There have been two big additions to the team-- Bruce Bartlett and Ed Andrews -- and both have had an immediate impact on everything from the public discourse to CG&G's numbers.
The one thing we haven't done is change CG&G's look. That's what's coming.
Troy is working on a new design that will be cleaner, more modern, and make it possible for us to accommodate the additional advertising requests we're getting. It will also make it possible for us to do more with audio and video.
The changes will also allow us to address some of the formatting and other issues readers have brought to our attention (Thanks. Please keep those cards and letters coming in).
The design changes aren't yet final and probably won't be implemented until the end of the month. But in the meantime, as far as design and features are concerned, what else would you like to see?
Suggestions: 1. Some blogs
Suggestions:
1. Some blogs have a check box for the commenter to be sent an email automatically if someone replies to his/her comment. I think Donald Marron's blog has this feature. Would be nice.
2. My understanding is that there was a spambot problem a few months ago that hit many blogs and CG&G switched from comments being automatically posted to submissions being reviewed and actively posted by one of the contributors. Not only does this cause delays that inhibit discussion, but some comments seem to get discarded rather than posted for no apparent reason other than some challenge/refutation of the contributor's arguments. For both reasons, going back to automatic comment posting would be very much preferable. Seems that almost all blogs -- even those that temporarily held comments for review last year when the spambot apparently hit -- have automatic posting of comments.
3. Often the figures that appear on the home page indicating the number of comments on each thread is lagged -- it doesn't reflect the latest actual number of comments on that thread.
Advertising
With calls to serve up ads it takes longer for the page to load (not to mention that some ads are distracting/annoying). I realize that this is necessary to produce revenue, but could you offer a subscription alternative (premium member service) that eliminates the ads? I belong to another blog where I pay $40 a year to subscribe and the ads go away. Heck, charge $60 and throw in Bruce's book (but please, don't give me Palin's rag). I'd bite for that!
Another idea
Could you add an "Economic Reality Check" page?
Seems you guys are constantly rebutting misinformation (for example, Samwick has a post on Hatch's hatchet job on reconciliation). You could simply append issues to the reality check page as they arise.
Here's a "reality check" piece I read today, and it gave me the idea:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-schweitzer/michele-bachmann-overdriv_...
Thanks for being my economic gurus -- you all really rock, and I love this site.
Please don't use disqus or
Please don't use disqus or anything like it. Don't burden commenting with more fields to fill or check or more passwords and registrations to manage.
RSS
I know its annoying for advertisers, but a bunch of blogs have the RSS such that when I use Thunderbird, I see the text as an e-mail. Now, a whole page has to load. If I am working with a weak wireless signal, it takes a long time for the page to load, and I might give up if the subject looks boring (to me). If it loaded as text, I would read more.
Contributor Names Don't Show in Email Summary
Thank you for the wonderful public service you do with this blog! I have one suggestion, and this stems from the fact that I almost always read your blog through the daily email subscription service. In the daily email it does not include the names of the people who wrote each of the posts for that day. Sometimes it is rather obvious who the write was from the content, but often it is not. It would be great if you could fix this.
Thanks!