As a follow-up to Jack’s post about credit cards, here are a few other new additions to the web site. Hopefully this will be the last post of this type for awhile–we need to stop coding and get to fishing! But if nothing else it gives us a chance to post another picture of a sexy girl in a French maid outfit. 🙂
RSS Feed: We now have an RSS feed for the site. Actually, we have two: one for articles and one for the blog. What’s an RSS feed? We’re not 100% sure, but one of Jack’s readers (MarkS) suggested it and since it was raining that day and we were tipsy on drambuie we said, oh well, what the hell. Actually, an RSS feed is a kind of “live” bookmark you can add to the bookmarks in your web browser. Whenever new content is added to the site, the bookmark displays it automatically, saving you the trouble of visiting the site to see if there’s anything new.
New Mailer: We upgraded the software that runs the mailing list for Jack’s newsletter. Jack used to just enter email addresses manually in the address book on his computer which made subscribing and/or unsubscribing from the list a bit of a process. Now you can do it all yourself. There are also security safeguards in place so that you, and only you, can add or remove yourself from the list.
New Pointless Poll: The old software we used to publish the Pointless Poll was limited to five poll choices. We’ve now got a new one that allows up to ten. It also allows you to leave comments (a feature we haven’t turned on yet but will in the near future).
Language Translator: We’ve added a Google gadget that translates the entire site into any one of a dozen languages at a single click. It’s located in the sidebar on each page. The translations are not 100% perfect, but hopefully are good enough so that non-English speakers can understand the gist of the pages they’re reading. Several caveats about the translator: 1) whenever you use the pull-down menu (located at the top of each page) it reloads the whole site as English again. Of course, you could run the translator again, but you might be better served to navigate using the text links that appear at the bottom of each page; 2) for those making a purchase, the shopping cart and checkout pages are not translatable. Sorry, but there’s nothing we can do about that.
Old Pages and New Pages: We’ve upgraded the content on a lot of existing pages and added three new ones: a page about JackGartside.com, a page for the downloadable order form (for those who prefer to order by check or through the mail), and a page describing Jack’s security and privacy policies. You’ll find all three on the Contact & Ordering menu.