Couple changes on the site and in SbN overall that will be improvin' your reading/FanPosting/commenting experience.
#1 - AP Photos Partnership
One of my personal gripes was the inherent formatting issues that went with inserting a photo into a post. Thanks to a new partnership with AP and Getty, we'll be able to insert their photographs easily and cleanly. The new tools have some handy auto-cropping features and offer a variety of different formats for placing photos within posts, and already come coupled with captions and links to full slideshows of particular games. Makes my life easier and anything that lends itself to my overall malaise and laziness is a good thing.
#2 - Team Pages
This is where things get crazy. Check out the orange banner near the top of TNIAAM:
Go ahead and click on ORANGE. It should take you here. Whoa, right? S**t just got real.
The "Orange" tab links to the new SB Nation team page for Syracuse, which is a nice connection for all things SU sports on the network. The page collects every post that features the Orange in some way. Most of the content will be the posts you see here at TNIAAM, but it also includes stories, FanShots and FanPosts from other blogs that have Syracuse listed in their tags (for example, House of Sparky's preview of the Arizona State-Syracuse game. This means that it's that much more important for you to tag your FanShots/Posts with the relevant teams/players mentioned, as they will appear on the appropriate pages. The team pages also include a full schedule (with links to each team's own blog), a complete roster, and stats for the entire team. It's a wonderful resource for finding other blogs who are talking about the Orange besides lil' old me.
#3 - Player Pages
Speaking of player pages, there's some new additions there as well. Each player has his own page that compiles the articles that mentioned him, such as this one for Jonny Flynn.. The system is similar: if the player is tagged in a post, it'll appear on this page, along with up-to-date stats (if you absolutely need to know what Jonny's APG statistics are), a brief bio, a link back to the SBN blog that features his team, a transaction/injury compilation, and even which poster has most frequently featured that player in their articles. Essentially, the higher-ups have created a system that enriches their content by using the content that already exists -- the tagging idea merely serves as a way of gathering all of that information together into convenient places.
So if you haven't already, be as thorough as you can with tags in whatever posts you make, and this system will flourish even further.
#4 - Additional Coverage
Listed on each team's schedule page (as well as on the right sidebar on the front page and a couple other pages) is a link to the right of each game listed called "coverage."
The coverage page manages to stash all of the relevant information before and after each game. That includes previews, GameDay Threads, recaps, etc. as shown from each team's perspective (provided that team has an SBN blog). Again, it's a handy way to get additional coverage of the Orange, as well as engaging other fan bases in discussions about our wondrous athletics programs. The usual caveats about playing nicely at the blogs of other teams still apply.
Coupled with the recent immersion with Yahoo! and USA Today, these new features are really giving us a pretty impressive platform to work with. If nothing else, it's a couple new exciting toys to play with as we settle in to the saddest of times for Syracuse sports...the summer.
A special H/T to AZ Snakepit, from whom I stole about 90% of this.