The Dane's Head is evolving. Regular readers will have noticed that the site looks a lot different today. The site has had a facelift. In fact the changes are not just cosmetic - I've completely rewritten most of the code that runs the site.

A little history.
The Dane's Head has been online now for almost a year. During that time, we've had a slow steady increase in readers. Our google pagerank has gone from 0 to 4. The site has operated mainly as a football news aggregator.

I've been looking to improve the site. The aim of the site is to identify the most interesting football articles. The main problem with the old site was that it didn't categorize or rate the incoming articles. So it basically functioned as a newswire.

So what's new?
I've introduced better methods to filter articles and help users find the articles that are most interesting to them. Articles are tagged into categories of interest. You can look at articles that are only tagged with certain tags that you are interested in. You can also now rate articles. If you find an article interesting, you can vote it up. The articles that have received the most votes in the last few hours are listed in the "Hottest News" section. I am thinking of also using these votes to introduce a personalized recommendation system. Other features of the new system include user blogging, private messaging between registered users, user profiles, a user karma system and the ability to comment on articles.

What's coming next?
That depends on the users of the site. I'm open to suggestions on how to improve the site. Some of the things I'm thinking of are improving the automated tagging and introducing a recommendation system that will recommend articles based on which articles that a user has voted up.

So to try out the new features check out the about page, create a new account and start rating articles. Let me know what you think of the new features using the feedback form.