Welcome to the new Metroblogging DC!

For the last 9 months, our management and design team, in coordination with The Groop in LA, have been redesigning Metroblogging to move away from the old, server-intensive, Movable Type System. You’ve noticed that comments took forever to post, we’d noticed that stories took literal minutes to compile and post on the site, and frankly, no one was more upset about it than we were.Enter the new design. It’s sleek, it’s sexy, and for that, we have The Groop to thank for the overarching look and feel. I’m loving the Art Deco feel they chose for the overall, stuff, but that may just be me.Here’s a couple of the big changes that you, the reader, will notice:

User Registration

Yep, we decided it needed to be done. You will now have to register to comment here. The good news: One account, One password, always the same. We’ll never, ever, ever use the email address for spam or marketing purposes. We won’t even email you unless you want to sign up for our new Announcement Network. The bad news? Well, there’s really no bad news except you have to sign up.

Built-in Coolness

There are a lot of new features that we’ll be showing off and using in the coming weeks. Take a look at the new animated Flickr badge on the right. All you have to do to get your photos in there is to add them to our Flickr groups. We’ll also be deploying some cool new Google Maps integration, as well as some awesome native polling software.

Rate the Posts!

Be sure to use the Ratings feature on each post to tell us what you like and what you don’t like. Just a quick click on the stars at the bottom of the entry will give us a good indication of what you think. This will also effect the Best Of Metroblogging.

Three New Views

If you’ll look here at the top of the page, there are three ways to look at Metroblogging DC: Recent Activity, Most Interesting and Most Active. Each of these will give you a new and unique view of Metroblogging. Recent Activity will show what posts have recently been changed or had comments added to them, Most Interesting works on a special formula that we’ve determined, based on external links, comments and some other special sauce and killer robotics. Most Active will show you where the fire’s at. Give them a try!

New Authors Profiles

Check out the new Authors Section! We’ve done some work there to make sure that you can learn all about those who are writing here regularly.

Give us Your Feedback!

We’d love to hear what you think of the new design, please add your voice in the comments! In addition, if you have questions about specific features not working, drop a comment here and we’ll try to get it cleared up. We’re still trying to get our archives up and running, the move was not kind to our archive. We look forward to the new Metroblogging DC, and hope you do, too.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs