For those of you have been following Grind to Death longer than a year, you may well remember the countless number of visual and architectural changes the site went through, with the previous build probably being the most stable with about 6 months without interruption. Well impatience and curiosity got the better of me, and now we have a new visual style. This is for the most part due to an upgrade from our service and host provider, and wishing to benefit from the increased functionality, better templates, more rich user interface and just all round general improvement I have made the jump from Squarespace V5 to Squarespace Version 6. Some little used resources have been trimmed, but will make a reappearance in a better form when the functionality rolls out such as the forum and the download section.
As for the new functionality currently available to you as the user (there is so much for myself as a content creator and manager too)
- Better commenting system, allowing you to log on via twitter, facebook, google profile or just as a guest.
- Allows you to respond to a specific comment directly through threaded commenting.
- Share buttons
- An amazing Search feature, accessible by clicking the vault
- Allows me to host songs for streaming without need for a third party.
- Slideshows/Gallerys within a post.
- Much better Galleries.
- Code friendly version for mobile phones
- For our friends in the developing world, the new build of website is especially light making for quick load times.
- Lightbox for future images.
I hope you do like the new site design, I realised that most blogs went for something dark and dank, or excessively visual (have you been on metalsucks lately?) so I decided to keep things simple and pristine, not quite the typical extreme music aesthetic, but hopefully something that won't lose any favour with yourselves. Unfortunately some of the posts from our time at blogger where unable to translate to the new site architecture, so those posts were culled. As for those who miss the old GTD, or want access to material not supported on here you can still access it over at https://grindtodeath.squarespace.com/ . Although there shouldn't be a need to resubscribe under an rss feeder if you do find yourself needing so, the rss feed url is the same as the site entrance www.grindtodeath.com failing that www.grindtodeath.com/zine, but there should be no trouble since I went out my way to make sure the paths match in that regard.
Let us know what you think! And rest assured we are committed to the literary content rather than the visual, but in this case we think its nice to have both!
