Another overhaul. I've changed up the layout and got rid of a few menu options. Tags are broken for the moment.
I've continued on with the social media experiment and made a few additions, and a substraction. Facebook comments are gone for now—maybe to return in the future. Additions are some rijigging the Tweet button, and adding a button for StumbleUpon. Please click on these to help promote the site!
I've also started an Excuse Rolodex Twitter. Say hi!
Finally are the New Excuses and Tagcloud. A "New" button shows up next to Excuses that are considered new by the system. I'm going to try something with cookies in the future, but it's currently set to grad a percentage of the latest. Click that button, or "New Excuses" in the "More..." menu to get a selection of the latest Excuses. [Edit] it's gone from the bottom menu, but the badge now works with cookies. It's more fun.
The Tagcloud is just a tagcloud. I think it's the former art student in me, but I've always been fascinated with making these using PHP and inline CSS, no matter how much that makes me cringe.
You may have noticed some extra Facebook injected into the site today. Also, the "Show me Another" button now goes to an Excuse's individual page, so people find the comment section more easily. If it's annoying, please look around for a "Facebook blocker" extension that works with your browser, and shoot me an email (matthew@excuserolodex.net) to say so.
I've also set up a Facebook Page for the site, and have altered each Excuse's metadata to include its ID# and content. This way, the actual Excuse shows up when you leave a comment or Like things.
[Update]: I've just added a "Tweet" button—request above applies.
And I guess I should mention the whimsical/pretentious new way I'm doing dates. Yup.
I've added in some navigation options to explore the "rest" of the site. I'm not sure if I like it, and it might disappear pretty soon, but it's staying for now.
After a co-worker told me that the Excuse Rolodex was significantly uglier than the other sites I've made (to be fair, she was actually very diplomatic and polite about it), I decided to redesign. Since the vast majority of people browsing the site are using modern browsers, I went ahead with some fun CSS3 techniques, and took advantage of the very excellent Google Font API. Since the redesign, traffic and participation has significantly increased and the site recently passed 100,000 total page views and 10,000 "likes." Very cool.
Aside from the obvious aesthetic changes, I removed the navigation and mobile CSS since I couldn't find ways to keep them that didn't annoy me. I have an idea for the navigation that is non-obstrusive and might show up in the near future (currently, you can "navigate" by viewing commented text in the header), but the mobile CSS is gone for good. For a site like this, there's no reason beyond experiment.
Along with the great news of usage increase, there is bad news in that submission quality has completely tanked. Most are still great and I publish them to the site as soon as possible, but there has been a lot of racism and completely stupid ones coming through. So if you submit one and are wondering why it's never shown up, I probably just think you're an idiot.
Right now, I manually approve each excuse that gets submitted. Except for the first time ER ended up on StumbleUpon, it's never been overwhelming to click the "approve" box and I think it works.
I don't have any set rules for whether or not an excuse ends up on the site. Basically, if it's not needlessly offensive, illegible, or plain stupid, I'll put it through. Coincidentally, the few excuses I've left unapproved fall into all those categories. Overall, it's been really great seeing new ones come in—most are a lot better (and funnier) than the ones I started with.
Finally changed the navigation to something a bit more minimal and a lot less you-are-ugly-and-I-hate-you. Also got rid of the "network bar," which was an experiment that didn't convince me it was worthwhile. Sort of same thing with the tag suggestions.
And I started this blog. I'm considering a few more changes and thought I'd document them here.