Lawrence.com

We're starting a new blog here at lawrence.com: A meta blog, if you will.Because we work hard to continually add cool new features to lawrence.com, we figure it'd be useful for us to have a place to announce those new features and other site changes, along with a forum for readers to comment on the changes. A blog is the perfect place for that.So here, on the Behind the Scenes blog, we'll keep you updated with what's new around here. This blog will be updated occasionally by the lawrence.com staff. Everyone on our small team -- editors, developers, our designer -- will write about their areas of expertise when appropriate, and we'll always be looking out for your comments.Anyway, we'd like to start it off by mentioning some changes we've made around lawrence.com in the past few weeks. Here goes...Events calendarOur [events calendar][1] and [events search][2] have been redesigned to be less boxy and easier to peruse. The event listings used to be rather boxy and tabular, with rigid columns for event titles, venues, dates, etc., but they're now (we hope) a lot more friendly.We've also rolled ongoing events -- such as weekly gigs -- directly into the correct place in the calendar, rather than grouping them together at the end. It used to be that all the one-time events were displayed up-front-and-center and weekly events were kinda grouped together at the end of the listings. That was unfair to the weekly events, because they weren't given as much attention as the one-offs. But now, ongoing events are displayed alongside one-time events.On a related note, the [events calendar][1] and [search][2] now have a "Show ongoing events (such as daily activities)" checkbox that let you toggle whether you want to see all the standard ongoing activities, such as museum exhibits, in your search results. This is unchecked by default because we've found that most people use lawrence.com to find out about one-time events such as music shows.Band pagesWe've added more information to band pages, most notably discographies with each album getting its own page. (Examples: [Ghosty][3], [The Get Up Kids][4], [The Belles][5].) We've also linked-up band pages to [Turnpike][6] episode pages, where appropriate, and added a "Past shows" link to each band page that has a link to all the shows featuring the band from our event archive, which goes back to early 2003.This one's for the geeks out there: We've changed the URLs of band pages to be friendlier. For example, instead of calendars.lawrence.com/bands/42/, the URLs now look like www2.lawrence.com/bands/the_danny_pound_band/. We're working on changing that "www2" to "www"...Stay tuned.Historic download statsA popular part of lawrence.com is the [top downloads page][7], which lists the most-frequently downloaded mp3s this week. (The tallies reset every Sunday.) We've been keeping every week's top-25 list, but we haven't done anything with 'em -- until now. Now, you can click on "See last week's final chart" and keep clicking "Previous week" to go back in time all the way to May 2003. You can even click on the "Times in top 25" for a particular track to see its chart history.Coming upWe're about to start going crazy with commenting functionality. In the upcoming weeks, you'll be able to post comments on individual albums, bands, events, movies, restaurants, bars and venues. And speaking of comments, we've been working hard to add improved community features that make it easier to sort through helpful comments and, well, not-so-helpful comments. Of course, all of these new features will be announced right here on Behind the Scenes.Let us know what you think of all this stuff, and let us know what else you'd like to see on lawrence.com. You can post a comment below or e-mail us at homies@lawrence.com. [1]: http://www2.lawrence.com/events/ [2]: http://www2.lawrence.com/events/search/ [3]: http://www2.lawrence.com/bands/ghosty/ [4]: http://www2.lawrence.com/bands/the_get_up_kids/ [5]: http://www2.lawrence.com/bands/the_belles/ [6]: http://www2.lawrence.com/turnpike/ [7]: http://www2.lawrence.com/mp3/top/