August 2012 recap - Spending the summer with Sidepodcast - The mid-season break sees next to no slow down with guest posts aplenty

Published 3 September 2012 by Christine

With Formula One taking a much-needed but rather extended break in August, there was time for us here at Sidepodcast to sit back and take stock of how things were going in 2012. Did we do that? No chance! Development continued apace, the guest posts came flooding in, and we ramped up the community activities to help keep ourselves entertained. With no races, let's go straight to what happened site-wise last month.

Sidepodcast in August

The second half of the 2012 season is set to be packed with nine races in thirteen weeks and so Mr C was hurrying to get several of his projects finished before surrendering the site to the racing action again. The first, and to my mind most important, is the updates to the live events widget.

On the sidebar of any page, you'll find the live events table. Up until recently, it displayed a few recent events and any upcoming items, but was limited to showing only the title and the date. Now, with the addition of a small rotation symbol, a whole new dimension has been opened up! Click the swirly icon in the title bar and you'll find more information about dates and times for the upcoming events, meaning you now never need to miss a thing!

The comments can come flooding in for an event, or for a specific post, and we've now got an easy way to tell if there is conversation happening somewhere on the site. Just below the live events widget is the new Pulse chart, which updates automatically to show the level of commenting activity across the site. If there's a peak, you know there's something happening, and it's worth a quick investigation to find out more. And, as if we had planned it, there's an update to the Recent Comments page that will help with just that.

The active discussion table at the top updates automatically as comments come in, showing you the latest threads that have been commented on. They help to pick out conversations you might have missed - particularly if there is a live event on that is dominating the comments page by itself. Gradually, the system is coming together to help make F1 and community conversation seamless and enjoyable. I love it!

Shows in August

Where we finally found ourselves some time to do some podcasting, there was absolutely nothing to talk about! Joe went on a well-deserved summer holiday, and after using up all the news in one Feet Up Friday, we were left with a few weeks of drought. We will make up for it in September!

Posts in August

In previous years, and in 2012 as well, we have often proclaimed the racing downtime to be just as useful as the GP weekends. These periods allow you to gather your thoughts, they grant time to actually do something about these thoughts, and this year has proven this to us once again. The community stepped up magnificently in the break, with guest post after guest post flying towards us. At one point we had a backlog waiting to go up, and it was absolutely incredible. We're very grateful, and the site is all the better for the fantastic work you all do towards it.

In particular, I want to mention our Features writers who did a sterling job in the face of nothing to analyse: Talk on Corners, Adam's amazing midterm report work on Class of the Field, 107 Per Cent, and to a lesser extent my Midfield Monitor.

Thanks to all and keep up the good work!