I had a chance this weekend to make some improvements to the site. 99% of the people who read this probably won’t be as into them as much as I am (particularly the icons for the iPhone and Touch), but there is one improvement that I think everyone will appreciate.. at least those who use RSS readers.

Full Feeds

It’s been a long time coming, but I’m now offering up full text feeds for StoryFanatic. I’ve avoided it for a long time for two main reasons:

• I wanted people to click through the site so that I could make money through various ads
• I’ve had material “ripped off” before on other blogs that I’ve run and didn’t want some anonymous person taking all the credit for my hard work

As pertaining to the first reason, in the 2 years that this site has been running, I’ve made about $4.50 from my ads — not a compelling reason to keep them going. For whatever reason writers just don’t click through ads and thus can’t justify the lure of the partial feed.

As for the second reason, stealing content was a major problem for me on my character animation site, Seward Street. In short, someone was basically taking my full posts and reposting them on their own site - complete with their own ads. It was a huge annoyance to me that someone would take credit for my work and somehow make money off of it.

I don’t think that will be a problem here.

I also began to realize that I hated other sites that forced me to click through my reader (I use Google Reader) to read their material. I enjoy being able to quickly scan the material from the other blogs I read and can’t stand when they only offer partial feeds — why was I doing the same?

So full feeds are go. You might notice some formatting errors with pictures and charts. It’ll take me a couple of posts to get this worked out.

Screenwriting on an iPhone/iPod Touch

The second improvement is all about coolness.

I’ve had an iPod Touch for a couple of months now and absolutely love it. My only reason for not purchasing an iPhone was because of the slow network speeds and because I can’t stand AT&T’s coverage. That being said, as soon as the faster 3G iPhone comes out, I’ll definitely be picking one up.

In the latest firmware for both devices you can now add WebClip bookmarks to your home screen. WebClips are basically icons that you can press to instantly jump to your favorite sites. Unfortunately, unless the site you want to bookmark has a special icon set up all you’ll end up with is an unrecognizable screenshot as your icon.

Of course, I couldn’t resist and added one for this site as well as convinced Chris over at the Dramatica site to set one up as well.

As you can tell this is the ultimate in geek screenwriting — both sites are there on my home screen ready to be viewed at a moment’s notice.

Easy Viewing on an iPhone

I’ve also installed a special theme specifically designed for reading blogs on an iPhone/iPod touch. While the built in Safari browser does a great job of rendering sites, it can be difficult having to constantly zoom in and zoom out to read certain posts.

This new theme should make it easier. 

Again, only 0.01% will probably be into these iPhone improvements as much as me, but I thought it was cool. Eventually the whole world will be run from an iPhone anyways, so why not join the revolution early!

Color Palette Change

As mentioned before this site looked mighty ugly on an iMac. I’m trying out a new color palette and will probably change it from time to time.

That’s it!

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