Welcome to the new site!
Alrighty, so it took me about a month longer than expected, but the new site is finally up and running. As you can see, I didn't really change too much of the overall look and feel, most of what I did was on the back-end, reworking all the existing code to run smoother and more efficiently. Of course I also added a few extra things here and there, some of which I will run down for you now:
Friendly URLs. I spent many, many hours banging my head against the wall, but eventually I managed to wrangle Apache's mod_rewrite module to do my bidding so now you actually get a sense of what a post is about before you click that itsatrap.com link. I've improved the meta tags too, so posting links on Facebook will work a heckuva lot better than it did before. Better SEO doesn't hurt either, though that's never a huge concern for me. Old links should still work fine, but if you find an exception, please let me know! Same goes for any errors that you may run across for that matter.
Better searching. Okay, so I can't really claim it's that much better, but I really did make some changes to the way the queries are run and I think it's a marked improvement. And I also added a search-suggestion widget to the site, so if you're looking for a particular artist or label, it'll help you figure out the proper spelling.
Artist and label pages. Along with the improved search functionality, I've also built out dynamic pages for all of the artists and labels in our resource library database. Add an artist to your watchlist for quick access and get the latest news all on one page. There's even RSS feeds too! Oh, and double-clicking artists and label names in posts (look for either bold text or the dotted blue underline) will take you straight to the page in question.
Custom filters. I did away with individual user watchlist pages because I've built something even better -- custom filters. Users can now create and share their own customized feeds based on artist, label, genre, country, tag or even a key phrase. It's still kinda in beta right now, but please play around with it and provide feedback! This is something I've been meaning to do for a long time, so I'm really excited about it. And, for the nerds, here's some more info copy + pasted from the help page: Selecting multiple items across the artist, label and country columns are appended with an "or" operator, while the genre, tag and phrase columns are added with an "and". The selection of multiple entries within the genre or tag columns however, is applied with an "or". Confused yet? How about this: country labels are applied to individual posts going back to November 18, 2009 while genre tags are attached to artists which means that they only reference artists that are in our database, not necessarily all the artists we've ever covered. Naturally, custom filters also have their own RSS feeds as well.
I think that about covers it as far as major updates are concerned. I've still got a few small things I'm planning to implement in coming weeks, but feel free to leave a comment to let me know what you think of the changes so far! (and while you do that, note that you can now preview your comments before you post)