Shoot Up's new birthday suit

The observant among you may have noticed a few changes with your soaraway Shoot Up. In celebration of our first birthday I’ve been tinkering around under the hood with the intention of improving the site’s “user experience”, whatever that means.

Essentially you’ll keep getting the same quality Shoot Up blogging goodness but now the forums have been more closely integrated and I’ve added a whole bunch of exciting web-2.0-social-networking guff that you all might enjoy.

Chief amongst these benefits is the ability to have a profile associated with your account allowing you to track what you’ve said in blog comments, the forum and wherever else all from one spot, namely the “Activity” tab. Woo!

Conversely you can now more effectively stalk other users by checking out their activity tabs to see what they’ve been up to recently. You can then add them as a “Friend” or even send them private messages. If you want to mention someone in a comment or forum post you can add an @ symbol before their user name and it will duly link to their profile. Of course, you can still post anonymously if you prefer.

There are other features, such as custom avatars and what-not, which you can discover for yourselves; but you’ll be pleased to hear that the forum will remain a signature and graphic-less oasis of text-based calm.

As always, the new technology will inevitably let us down so please feel free to drop me an email if something breaks or you hate one of the new features. I might even care.

So, there we have it – happy birthday Shoot Up, thanks to all the volunteer beta-testers for their time and enjoy the improvements folks!