nice! This thing has a lot of convenient features.

The template is pretty good, too. Here are my gut reactions. Be forewarned: I'm nitpicky and I have my own set of preferences that may or may not be universal.

OK, here's my main worry about the design as it stands now: the contrast between the text and the background in the center column isn't great enough for easy reading. After a while it starts to hurt the old eyes! So if I were a benevolent blog dictator I would use black-on-white boxes to make it more readable or change the entire background of the site.

My second reaction to the design is that there ought to be a better way to distinguish one bbc headline from another. When the line breaks, it's hard to scan because the distance between one headline and another are the same as the distance between one line and another. I'm not sure whether you have any control over that or not.

This is probably a problem with the default template, but I don't think you need the left and right margins to be so wide. You'd get more content in the middle and maybe help out with the linebreak problem in the headline feeds if this empty space were reapportioned.

A final initial design concern is the size of the text box for comments -- I think it's too small. Someone as garrulous as yourself ought to agree!

As to features, I think eventually it will be a good idea to tweak the "Recent Comments" to show the name of the poster. Having an 8-word snippet of the comment itself would be a bonus. My opinion is that it's a good idea to put this at the top so that visitors don't have to scroll to see who's talking. When I had my own blog, I got many more comments and traffic once I did things this way.

As to feeds, I have two questions.

One, do you think it's redundant to have both Reuters and the BBC? Or do you think they complement one another?

Two, do you think MediaMatters fits with your vision for the site?

OK, that's all I have for now. What do you think?

Just caught a real problem -- the book review template breaks when you put the link in. Is there a way to use something other rather than the raw URL as the text for the link?

I'm not terribly excited about their book review template. It's kind of a screwy "build a community" feature, because I think it's been built as a form that can be polled remotely and included in some sort of aggregator to be built by Blogware, the developer of this system. It's too rigid and did some squirrelly things to me as well.

I'm thinking we could treat book reviews as just regular articles in terms of type of entry and how they're categorized. But then have on the main page of each category a few thumbnails of some good books on topics relevant for that category (either at the "theme" level or at the lower "topic" level). If you want to put thumbnails in an article, it's easy (and you can do text wrap). The thumbnail I pulled from Amazon is a great big clunky thing -- they've got other more attractive formats for including within a text, I just didn't have the patience to play with them any further right now.

I've got an "Amazon associate" account which makes it easy to create thumbnails of books or CDs (or vaccum clearners I suppose) with all the links built it. If someone buys after clicking on the link you get a few pennies. I'm not interested in the income, it's just convenient for lnking to all the Amazon info.

Good feeds here, I've found:

http://www.worldpress.org/feeds/

They've got a sharp eye for stories, and they translate some that you wouldn't otherwise be able to read.