Welcome to the new Opinionista. I can’t tell you how excited I am to bring you this new look. It’s been quite a challenge getting here, most of it technological. But, it also took some serious thought. Speaking of serious thought, as I write these lines, I’m not sure where to place this post. It doesn’t belong in “Life” like the one from Monday where I announced the blog’s move. I could put it in “Entertainment”. Although, that seems pretentious, not only because Opinionista is not a major publication but mostly because I’m not sure that it’s always entertaining. Perhaps, it should be in “Americana” as Opinionista will continue to focus on the U.S. even though it no longer has a .us URL. Yes, that’s it.
But anyway, I wanted the new Opinionista to have a modern look, to be easy to navigate, to be as minimalist as possible, although I didn’t mean to get rid of tags, I just haven’t yet figured out where they are in this new theme.
I have, however, removed OpinionList as a category. I’m no longer writing one every Friday. In the future, OpinionLists will be few and far between and will cover subjects in only one category, like the latest one on books.
Each category has its own color now (something that I’ve been wanting since I created the blog four years ago, but wasn’t able to do before). “Politics” is in blue, not only because I’m a Democrat but also because these days I’m blue about politics. The homepage features five posts in each category which I think it’s awesome because it’ll get you to click around more. Yes, I can be quite manipulative.
One thing that will not jump out at you, unless you are a grammar freak like me, is that I will be using logical punctuation in this blog. I’ve decided to free myself to put periods and commas after quotation marks, you know, like it’s done in England where the English language was born. If you need more background on this decision you can read Are Americans Illogical When It Comes To Punctuation?
One of the features that I really love about the new Opinionista is the ability to rate the posts. I know that we’re all very busy and that it takes time to leave a comment. With the post rating system, all you have to do is slide over the stars at the bottom of a post and click.
Please, please, please, please, please, please, please, rate the posts. This will let me know if you think my writing is good (or not), and what kind of content you prefer. It will also allow me to display the highest rated posts on the homepage and not just the most recent ones. Why is this important? Let me explain.
One unfortunate consequence of moving the site is that I was not able to bring over my stats. I have to start from scratch. Now, even though when I started the blog, it was supposed to be mainly about politics, the most popular post on Opinionista, by far, is Why Do Most Men Suck In Bed? (sex always trumps everything else). But, because of the lack of stats, I am forced to feature the most recent posts instead of the most popular. This means that you and the hundreds of friends that you will talk to about Opinionista might miss a great post on sex (if I may say so myself) that you should not.
If you really like Opinionista, besides telling all your friends about it, consider subscribing. It’s not only free, you will only receive one email per week, on Mondays when a new post is published. No advertising, no BS, just my latest opinion(s) which, of course, you can consider BS, but I try really hard so that you don’t. It goes without saying, but I will write it anyway, your contact information is precious to me and I will not share it with any entity: human, animal,vegetable, commercial, virtual, or alien. You get the point.
I’m going to stop now so that you can discover the new Opinionista. If you love the new look half as much as I do, you’ve already made my day month.
All the best.