Welcome to Brainsturbator 2.0

You’ve already noticed things look different.  Charles Blingus, the mastermind behind Back Brain Media, has been itching to re-design Brainsturbator for over a year now.  With some help from our friend Gomar, we’ve finally got a fully operational Brainsturbator 2.0 up and running.

I’m also working on a ton of new articles, and if you’re curious where things are headed, I did a rambling forum post outlining some of it.  Meanwhile, the most logical way to kick off the new design is a quick explanation of our new features.  It’s also an open call for user feedback, so if you’ve got some, please drop a comment here.

Our Lush New Archives

Charles Blingus really outdid himself on our archive section.  This was long overdue, since our old archives were barely functional and something a lot of readers complained about.  So the fact is, we went overboard.  Everything is now hyper-meta-easy to find, although of course we’re still fishing for feedback from you, the end user.

We’ve kept a custom search and a calendar archive above the fold, and beneath that you can find the Category archives, and a big list of my personal favorite articles. 

The Collapse/Expand Meta Function

I could have given this a simpler title, but I love the fact Brainsturbator is becoming a technological artifact with specialized parts.  Our key insight here is that most of the “metadata” attached to our articles is not useful for casual readers.  Although it’s important to document details, none of them are relevant to the actual content.  (Unless you’re an automated spider bot working for some search engine...but that’s not reading, just processing.)

When you open a Brainsturbator article, we keep all the metadata hidden, or “collapsed.” When you click on “expand,” you’ll be getting the full metadata—a feature we’re still fine-tuning but we’re very happy with where it stands now.  (I’m still in the process of fleshing out the older articles with highlights and related article recommendations.)

Random Related

This was too cool to leave out: random article feed is a feature that suits Brainsturbator perfectly, both in terms of reflecting the actual content, and in terms of giving our readers exactly what they’re here for.

Twitter Integration

Twitter is, for the most part, a very noise-heavy channel, and it might seem like a self-indulgent move to have a twitter feed here on Brainsturbator.  Actually, this is a deliberate move on my part to make sure my Twitter activity is something useful, something that provides content that will enhance the site here.  I’m still very hopeful about the potential of Twitter to become something more important and valuable than one big instant messaging orgy.  This is a platform that’s just barely getting started, and we’ll keep this feature going until it either collapses under it’s own hype, or metastasizes into a world-destroying AI demonic network entity.  (Currently scheduled for January 2010.)

An Open-Ended Question

Anything you want fine tuned for 2.1?  Anything you can imagine for 3.0?  Drop a comment here, and as always, thanks for your time and attention.