It’s like power steering for your blog!
We did a lot of analysis of how people find information, and fail to find information. We looked at our categories and our menus, and discussed, and diagrammed, and went into the Analytics to see which pages were hard to find. We came up with drafts and we revised and revised again. And here we are.
We want to make sure our newer shows are easy to find, while still keeping Mad Men front and center. So, your Mad Men menu keeps everything you need in one place: Episode Guides, Cultural References, Schedule, Quotes, the whole nine yards. Please explore.
Other TV will help you easily find all the other shows we blog, including Downton Abbey, The Walking Dead, and Hell on Wheels. So handy! If we add subpages for any of those shows, this is where you’ll find them.
Books & Films is the place for reviews of other media.
Features is some of our coolest stuff: Interviews, Fan Art, Stuff to Buy—things that might otherwise be hard to categorize.
News is a newly-organized way of finding one of our most popular features: You’ll find the Basketcase-submitted news as well as the submission form (now on its own page), and an archive of our Basket of News posts.
Finally, Categories is still in the sidebar, and that’s reorganized as well.
Enjoy your explorations!
What happened to the calendar on the side, so we could go to an exact date?
And past commentaries and comments on specific mad men episodes?
I can restore the calendar, I didn’t see much use for it; didn’t look like many people used it. No comments have been moved, so if you can be more specific about your question, I’ll be happy to help.
The navigation system looks good – logical, orderly, organized. I like it.
So it’s less important now, but any chance you might change the look of it again? There’s already somewhat less pink, so that’s a start.
We haven’t touched the pink, berk, but it’s cute that you think so.
In my office (where I am now) I use two computer screens–it’s a help with all the reports I work in. I am now, for the first time, looking at a side by side of our blog. There is a dramatic difference–one shows a more pepto bismol pink, and the yellow is a very soft yellow, and the title/outline is somewhere between magenta and maroon. The other screen is much, much bluer–the pink is closer to purple, the yellow is barely distinguishable from white, and the title/outline is a deep burgundy.
I don’t know if there’s any way to do this, but I would love it if the calendar would include a drop-down menu so we could look at comments for a specific month, instead of having to page back over and over again through each month. Also, is there no search feature, or am I overlooking it?
The calendar is a standard WordPress feature, and I find the same problem you do, Meowser. I haven’t found a better one.
There’s supposed to be a search box in the header, but I see that it’s somehow gone, so I’ll put it back in the sidebar.
Thank you for this great site and the constant updates in these much too long Mad-Men-light times!
There is one feature that would enhance the usability of the site greatly (at least for me).
When I rewatch an old episode, I often have the urge to check out what is written on Basket of Kisses about it.
To do this, there’s the helpful tag feature in place, (e.g. Meditations in an Emergency).
Sadly, there isn’t an easy way to click on these tags when you don’t find an article about the episode by accident (or at least I haven’t found it).
Right now, I have to look at an article at the main page, click on one of its tags and then manually change the url to get to the episode. It’s not that much “work”, but maybe it prevents people from using the feature, because it’s somewhat hidden.
It would be really helpful if all the episode tags were linked at a central place. For example, the episode guide list could look the following for each episode:
(Full recap) (Quotes) (Tagged articles)
Fabian, that’s an interesting idea. Every article is tagged, and so there are hundreds of tags. We do have a search box in the header, which should bring up the tagged articles on a search term. I can investigate if there is an easy way to search tagged articles. Tag clouds are fun but not really useful for what you’re describing.
on that note—it would make logical sense to me that the episodes listed in the episode guide contained links to every post about that episode.
I do like the sidebar cleared up
If you go to any episode guide page, you’ll find that each episode links to the full recap and to the quotes section for that episode.
A link to the “tag” page is possible but would have to be coded manually (by me) for all 52 (so far) episodes. That’s a lot of work. I’ll look into automated solutions.
Looking for recaps to s2.10-11…Jet Set and (especially) Mountain King, and not finding them linked from the s2 episode guide.
Specifically looking for that tarot reading from Mountain King and any possible relevance to Don’s current character development.
Many thanks!
Pete, if you go to any season’s episode guide, you’ll see that, after a brief episode synopsis, there’s (full recap) (quotes). Those are hyperlinked to the appropriate pages. The recaps you’re looking for are there.
The Tarot reading, though, is a post, not part of the recap, and you can find it here: http://www.lippsisters.com/2008/11/04/the-tarot-reading/
aha! for some reason it wasn’t showing up on my other browser (I swear). all is good, thanks for your reply and posting to the Tarot reading followup.