New Ways to Browse and Share on Swamplot

You may have noticed a few new features on Swamplot recently. It’s now easier to browse our site archives — by neighborhood, zip code, or article category. Directly below the search box in the far left column of this website there are now three separate dropdown menus that can help you do this. Pick an item from one of them and see where it takes you!

In general, selecting an item from one of the menus will give you more tailored results than you’ll get from typing the same term into the search box. For example, if you’re searching for stories about a particular zip code, the zip code menu will bring you all posts that have been “tagged” with a particular zip. Using the search box will bring you all posts that mention the zip code at all. This means that search results for a zip code will also include mentions of the code in our Daily Demolition Reports.

You can still browse through our archives topically by clicking on one of the tags listed at the end of any story (after the words “Read more about:”).

It’s now also much easier to share items you’ve found on this site with friends — through email, text messaging, instant messaging, or social-bookmarking sites. You’ll notice at the bottom of every post there’s now a “ShareThis” link and icon. Click on it, and you’ll be able to send friends a link to the article you’re reading . . . without even leaving the page.

If you click on the “Social Web” tab, you’ll find buttons that make it easy to post items you’ve found on Swamplot to your Facebook or MySpace page, or to submit them to digg, del.icio.us, reddit, NewsVine, StumbleUpon, or a few other social bookmarking sites.

The simplest way to send a friend a story from Swamplot, of course, is through email. And now doing that is even easier than cutting and pasting a web address into your email program. All it takes is two clicks and a little typing: Click on the ShareThis link at the bottom of the story you want to send, enter your friend’s email address and your own, add a short message if you like, and click the Share button. Try it!