The eagle-eyed amongst you might have spotted a few tweaks here and there to the ballinascreen.com website. Regular visitors to will know that the website, in its current form, has been up and running for almost 4 years – but we thought it was about time we made a few changes.

So, to get you started, here’s a quick run down of the most significant new features:

• you can now search the entire ballinascreen.com article archive, long overdue if you ask us. You can search by keyword(s), year, month, or category,
• which leads us nicely onto categories – the old site did use a basic categorisation system – which was exactly that – basic – here we’ll make much more effective use of article categorisation, and as you’ve just found out, it will also assist during article searches.
• article ratings and comments. We’re not sure what we’re letting ourselves in for here, but visitors will now be able to rate each of our articles (so we know what you like and what you don’t) and users will also be able to submit comments or start a discussion on a given news item – however, you will need to Register an account with us in order to be able to post comments (we’ll be moderating those just to make sure things don’t get out of hand!).
• voting polls – from time to time we’ll publish a topical poll, allowing visitors to cast their vote and see a breakdown of how others have voted.
• discussion forums will remain offline for now – partly because we’d like to see how the article rating and comment posting work out, we may not need a fully fledged forum and secondly, if we do re-instate the forum we need to be confident that we have the time and resources to moderate it – we don’t need to tell you how out of control these things can get if left to their own devices!
• integration with video and photo streaming services such as YouTube and Flickr – we’ll be publishing a selection of video and photo content to augment our existing, and very popular, Image Gallery.
• support for mobile devices – increasingly people are accessing the web on the move, from mobile devices such as the iPhone and portable netbooks. By default, if you access ballinascreen.com using a recognised mobile device, you’ll be offered a lightweight mobile version of our site – you can always choose to override this if you wish and view the full-fat version!
• mailing list support – if you’re unable to visit the website regularly, why not get the latest news direct to your inbox but subscribing to the ballinascreen.com mailing list – and if you find its not for you, you can unsubscribe at any time!

Tempting though it may be, we’ve tried not to make too many drastic changes to the overall look and feel of the site at the moment – we’d like to give the new system a little time to bed in whilst not overwhelming regular visitors with lots of unfamiliar layout and functionality. However, we are very definitely laying the foundations for the future, so make no bones about it, changes are on the way. This is very much a ‘work in progress’ at the moment, so don’t be surprised if things break occasionally, or features appear only to disappear soon afterwards.

For now though, why not take the new ‘old’ site out for a spin see what you make of it, and when you’re done you might want to share your thoughts and ideas with us on our Feedback page – we’re always listening.

Enjoy!