Just a quick note to let you know that we’ve made a few changes to the website this morning. Nothing major, really, just a few nips, tucks, and augmentations to better serve you, the reader, in your daily quest to wring the awesome from the triple-weave beach towel otherwise known as Scout Magazine. Get the full details  on these changes after the leap or feel absolutely free to wander the site aimlessly in search of them on your own…

The Dope

We thought it might be a good idea to reach out to our readers and the small town population that has become our amalgamated mailing list with a newsletter detailing all the sweet stuff that Scout covers and comes across during the course of the week (and then some). We’re calling it “The Dope”, as in “getting the dope, the skinny, the word on the street.” Sign up to receive it here.

The Carousel

After canvasing a cross-section of our readership we learned that many of them thought the purpose of the division between the posts that made it into the main revolving image carousel (above) and those below (right here) was unclear. We’ve concentrated on fixing that by adding a coloured descriptor bar to the top left of every carousel image. The colour changes with the subject matter, and briefs you on the content. The wicked nerds among us will notice that the colours are those from the Trivial Pursuit question cards, except for the brown, which we’ve changed to red. We also enlarged the carousel images by a third and changed the headline text colour from Scout Red (yeah, that’s what we call it) to a silvery white.  You’ll notice in the coming days and weeks that the main stories, the Scout List, our interviews, and notes on who has joined the Scout Community will be featured there more consistently. To that end, we changed the “Just Scouted” title on the carousel image’s top right to “FEATURES”. The regular news and bits and pieces that we’ve more accurately “just scouted” can be read under the new “HEADLINES” banner at the top of the main blog feed.

Social Media

To make posting the Scout content that you’d like to share with your Facebook friends and Twitter followers that much easier, we’ve added new share icons to the top right of every post, as well as a matching new comment icon. Clicking either the Facebook icon (the “f”) or the Twitter icon 9the bird) will take you directly to the respective social media app interface where you can comment and share, as in “Look at how awesomest Scout just got!”

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Look for more changes in the coming weeks as the full roll-out of Scout 3.0 continues. Thanks for reading!