Announcing New PNW Topic Hotlist Features

I've been meaning to get time to do this for a long while, but this week, somehow, I finally got around to it...

Announcing... the PNW Topic Hotlist "All You Can Eat" version! (and admit it, who can resist an all you can eat anything?)

You may have noticed (or not - it is very new) a "View More Entries..." link at the end of a topic's list of entries in the PNW Topic Hotlist in my sidebar (also available at better progressive blogs in the Pacific NW). Well, like a door to a seemingly nondescript English telephone booth, this link opens up to a page where you can view every currently active entry for every currently active topic, as opposed to a reduced number, randomly displayed to fit the limited confines of a blog's sidebar.

The entries are listed latest first for each topic. The topics can be collapsed and expanded as in the sidebar lists, but also all together with one click. This makes viewing the content quicker and more convenient. Most people displaying the Hotlist have selected to show none of a blog entry's text in their sidebar, or just a small amount. This view displays a longer version, also available to sidebar users, but again understandably a little much for the small space of a sidebar.

As you will quickly see, while you can view at most 10 entries per topic in the sidebar version, and many have chosen to display fewer, this page displays all the entries for a topic, and thus it will be common to see as many as 30, 40 or 50 for the more written about topics.

In addition to the PNW Topic Hotlist content I've listed the Hotlist blogroll - those blogs that are being aggregated for display in the Hotlist. This helps give a sense of the breadth and depth of the Hotlist content. I've also been tossing around the idea of making this blogroll something anyone can add to their sidebar. Technically it would be very simple - the question is whether it would be popular enough to bother. Comments welcome.

While this new page can be accessed from the "View More Entries..." link in sidebar Hotlist displays, it can also be accessed directly at http://www.topichotlist.com/th/topichotlist.shtml. Feel free to bookmark the page and to use it regularly as yet another means to stay abreast of what progressives in the Pacific NW are writing about. A future likely enhancement will be the addition of a "new" indicator so that you can see what's new since you last viewed it. Such a feature would likely have to use browser cookies, so those that don't have an appetite for them won't benefit, but for most it would probably be useful.

So take a look, kick the tires, and let me know what you think!

Update: I mentioned above that a future enhancement will be a "new" indicator to see what's been added since your last visit, and the feature has now been added. You won't see anything the first time, but when you come back, if there is new content, it should be flagged.