So there have been some big happenings here at TwistingAsphalt. As some of the more astute readers out there have probably already noticed the site has gone through a rather major overhaul. During the past several months as the site’s readership has continued to exponentially grow I’ve been gradually consumed by the thought that the basic layout not only was starting to feel a bit dated but more importantly was hurting the usability of the site for new users. After almost three years of fairly constant blogging my sense was that it was too hard for new users to find the things that they were looking for, so over the past several days I’ve spent a fair amount of time re-working things and adding new features.

The New Look
The most obvious and major change is the switch from a 2-column 800 pixel layout to a 3-column1024 pixel design. Up until now I’ve held off on this temptation since an 800 pixel look tends to be the most compliant with a wider range of monitor settings and for the longest time I couldn’t find a 3-column layout that didn’t feel cluttered in my estimation – but ultimately content concerns outweighed design aesthetics in my book and I felt it was time to offer more information when folks stop by. So after continuing to find lackluster 3-column layouts I merged the inner workings of two different WordPress themes together. Twisting Asphalt is now a blend of Razvan Teodorescu’s amazing Falling Dreams Theme and Clemens’ 3-Column Relaxation Theme. I’m hopeful that the combination will allow visitors to get to the site’s content more easily while at the same time looking clean and clutter free.

Translations Added!
The feature I’m most excited about is the new translation coding which will allow foreign visitors to read Twisting Asphalt in whichever language they desire. Translations for German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and simplified Chinese are now available and can be bookmarked for future visits.

An Online Store
With the additional web traffic comes increasing hosting fees, so as a means to support Twisting Asphalt I’ve decided to create an online store via CafePress. After a bit of research and toying around I’m excited to announce that opening of The Twisting Asphalt Online Store. Two different T-Shirts (one white & one black) and a baseball cap are now available!

Ducati Related News Feeds
News service aggregation is all the rage these days on the web and for good reason, it’s easy to do and it’s interesting additional content for visitors. There are a number of motorcycle related blogs that already offer very functional and easy to use RSS aggregation right now – Jame’s WhyBike Blog and Mike Werner’s Bikes In The Fastlane are two of the best in my opinion – but I’ve taken a slightly different approach given the niche nature of Twisting Asphalt. Instead of focusing on every bike blog out there I’ve tried to distill the feeds down to the most Ducati related news. Over time I plan on adding a few more sites once I can get their RSS syndication to work correctly.

Comments Now with Gravatars
For fun I’ve also added globally acknowledged avatars or Gravatars to the site’s comment sections so that folks who stop by and leave their thoughts can do so in a more personal environment. To use them you need to sign up at the Gravatar website and upload your own photo. After that whenever you leave a comment on any blog that supports Gravatars your personal image will automatically show up.

Related Posts
Again with an eye towards new visitors, I’ve added a small list of related posts at the bottom of each individual entry. As Twisting Asphalt gets closer to its third year of publication there’s a tremendous amount of content available that tends to be relatively connected, so I thought this might be a good way to allow visitors easy access to the various related entries.

Polls!
This one is merely for kicks. I’ve integrated a simple polling tool into the site as a means off adding more community fostering content. As the site’s traffic continues to skyrocket I felt it might be fun to see what others are thinking about on various topics. Right now the poll is very basic, but I’ve got some additional thoughts that I’m going to continue to work on – perhaps even polls designed for individual posts, who knows…

Closing
Finally, I wanted to thank everyone who’s swung by to check out Twisting Asphalt over the past several years. When I started the site it had 46 visitors the first month and now the site gets well over 10,000 uniques a month, so it’s extremely gratifying to see the site continue to grow and change. So I just wanted to say thanks