Although we're still fielding questions about the whereabouts of certain podcasts on a daily basis, I'm hoping that no-one can accuse us of taking it easy whilst Formula 1 takes a lesser role in our lives. This site's homepage recently saw something of a revamp and a number of smaller changes are occurring on a daily basis. It must be time for a behind-the-scenes update.

A Whole Lot of History

A couple of days ago I unearthed some concept artwork, intended to be the basis for a redesigned Sidepodcast. Version 3.0 was the name of the file, the creation date was listed as the 18 December 2008, with the last modified date coming a day later. A month previous we'd posted a request for feedback on the future design of this site, so I'm assuming the image in question came in response to that feedback.

Various circumstances stood in the way of realising the v3 update as quickly as intended, but its notable that within the past month we've probably gotten quite close to that goal. Here's the unedited image rediscovered last week.

If you compare the above to the homepage today, there are a lot of similarities. In the page header, the tabbed links optimistically list the 2009 season as an option, but the archive button and the more button appear in basically the correct place. The search box also appears in almost the correct position, although the bright red Ferrari nose never made the cut.

Further down the page the tabbed info box can be seen, and includes an in-place video player. The red buttons might be attempting to blend with the Ferrari, but conceptually they appear to provide identical functionality. The right hand page column also details the Daily Discussion, although the ability to join in the conversation from the homepage was unceremoniously dumped in the intervening period.

It surprises me, looking back at this artwork, just how long things take to materialise. I always imagined the internet to be a fast moving thing, where ideas become reality very quickly. That was 15 months of lead time at the very least.

Contextual Changes

The homepage revamp is finally getting there though, however late it might be. The extended navigation hiding behind the expandable "More" button, is probably my favourite part of Sidepodcast right now. It's not revolutionary, but it is a neat solution to the problem of too many links and nowhere to put them. I've wasted far too many hours expanding and shrinking the triangle, bouncing the page up and down, up and...

Also recently changed is the default body copy typeface, which has migrated from Helvetica to Lucida Grande (on machines and browsers that support it). Again many, many hours were wasted spent running through available options and it still took two weeks of daily usage to be convinced the change was worth it. It was worth it, right?

Getting all technical for a brief moment, audio and video podcasts are now being delivered to supported browsers using HTML5 technologies. That means if you are using up-to-date versions of Safari or Chrome, you'll likely get a better listening and viewing experience no effort required. It also means you can watch and listen directly on an iPhone, iPad or Android mobile, again no extra effort required.

To make things really simple, the latest audio and video shows play directly inside the tabbed homepage infobox, and that's HTML5 enabled too.

The final notable site improvement is also technical. It likely won't make any appreciable difference to anyone, but I like it. The Current Standings found on the homepage sidebar are a mini-revolution in themselves. Technically we could update results manually after every race, but instead the information is driven automatically from posts in the standings category. Blog entries on this site may look like any standard post when you read them, but they also have the ability to store data sources within them. This allows us to slice and dice the data and deliver it in ways not associated with the original post. Reducing re-keying on the homepage is a trivial use of the technology, but there's more to come on the front in the future.

I think that must wrap up most of the important changes. The F1 Twitter Directory now contains more lists than ever and the F1 Calendar offers some additional alternate means of accessing reminders.

I'll leave you with an amended Commenting Policy for your perusal. A page that even I can't get excited about.

Thankfully there were no announcements from Autosport International yesterday that made us scratch our heads. I mentioned in the comments that in prepping for the offline podcast this week, Mr C couldn't stop swearing when it came to talking about the rankings. Stay tuned for whether he manages to tone it down in the podcast or not! Meanwhile, here's what we're talking about:

• Pat has done the sensible thing and moved his website over from Blogger to Wordpress, and with a new title as well: I Watch Too Much Racing. Make sure you bookmark his new home on the web. Likewise, my own personal blog has made the switch back to hosted Wordpress, but it shouldn't affect your rss feeds, if you subscribe. Yay for Wordpress! (You don't hear that often round these parts so make the most of it!)
• It looks like Steven's wish could soon be granted and Paul di Resta will make the step up to Formula 1. At the moment, though, he's looking like filling the situation vacant as Force India's reserve driver, which doesn't really get a lot of miles under one's belt. Still, getting into the paddock is the first step, and di Resta is confident that's about to happen.
• A new blog has been brought to our attention in the best way possible - Ken asked if he could use one of our Flickr pictures as his header. You certainly can, Ken. He also has an interesting idea to compare the qualifying results rather than races - well, qualifying is the best part of the weekend, so I can't blame him.

That should do it for now, hope your weekend is going smoothly, let us know either way and I will see you in the comments.

In my research for daily facts and figures I have come across the best one ever. From the people's encylopedia, today is the day in 1853 when a dinner party was held inside the Iguanadon in Crystal Palace Park. We knew this! Mr Giggles took us to see those dinosaurs and told us that fact! In your face, Wikipedia! Eh-hem, here are some more F1 related things:

• I posted the Best of Debrief show yesterday - 2009 in Audio. It's a great trip through memory lane - the entire season crushed down into a twenty minute show with the best bits picked out by you guys. Thanks for all your submissions, and for the motivation to get the show complete. Couldn't have done it without you all.
• I'm contemplating the Best of Sidepodradio now, so if you have thoughts about what should go in that show, I am all ears. Simply post them in this thread and tag them #sidepodradio so I can pick them up later. Best of shows are hard work, but they are always worth it in the end!
• Mr C also wrote a brief update on some of the things we've been doing behind the scenes on the website. The graph included in that post is pretty cool, showing how much performance has improved since we started fiddling, and, well, basically stripping out Wordpress. Now things are so snappy round here, it's time to look at new stuff. Yay!

That should do it for now, let us know what you're up to and whether you have tired of your Christmas presents already. I'll see you in the comments.

Near the end of last year we mentioned that we were busy learning the finer details about WordPress installations. We were doing this mostly so that we could build the theme Christine could only find in her head, but also because we wanted to extend the platform a bit further.

Today, we can announce the first of those extensions, the F1 Minute Player.

Sharing

You may remember a while back that we made F1 Minute available to any website wishing to use it.

Embedding "bytesize Formula 1 news", involved copying and pasting a small block of code, which wasn't particularly onerous, but now we've made it even more straightforward.

If you have WordPress installed it's just a case of copying some files, before dragging the player into position on your page.

Plugging In

More information can be found in the the plugin directory, including detailed installation instructions, various configuration options and a couple of screenshots. There's also further information on the F1 Minute site too.

If you have a web site that's running a recent version of WordPress, and your Theme is relatively modern (e.g. it supports widgets), then you have all you need to get started. Feel free to give it a try and let us know what you think.

Feedback

This initial release is just the first step, a stable platform to build upon. We're already running the widget on the sidebar of this site and there's much more to come in the future.

As always, your thoughts / ideas / comments / criticisms are most welcome.

You may have noticed a new theme around these parts.

We're working on upgrading everything about the show, and the site was the first step. I wanted things to be a bit more orderly, because I am a control freak, so I spent a while looking around for new themes. I say a while, I mean a few months.

The thing is, there are so many themes out there that have interesting ideas or good designs attached, but none of them quite do the job for me. I found a couple that were contenders, but there was always something irrefutably wrong with them that couldn't really be fixed without major work.

The solution, it seemed, was to write our own Wordpress theme. So that's what I've been doing over Christmas. Fun! This is my punishment for being a control freak.

Actually, it was interesting, and although I can't claim to have done it all by myself, a lot of the CSS is written by my fair hands. So if you find anything irritating, I guess you should point your complaints at my good self.

Seriously though, it's still a little baby theme, with tweaks happening all the time, but if you see something you think could be done a better way, or any constructive feedback you'd like to make, we're open to any suggestions.

The quote button that was requested for the comments a couple of posts ago is now up and running, it has issues, but it works. We're hoping to bring some more buttons to make commenting even easier.