For the past month or so, we’ve been hard at work building a new look and feel for Pinyadda. Late last night after a final team-bonding, bug-squashing session, we pushed an jam-packed update out the door, complete with a sexified new look, some features you’ve all been asking for, and performance updates across the board.

Here’s a quick tour of the new features and a little description of each:

(Please note: A small fraction of the Pinyadda community is using Internet Explorer 7, and we are experiencing a few issues on this browser. Please bear with us as we work through these bugs.)

New Left Hand Navigation

This area is really the nerve center of your Pinyadda interface, and we wanted to add a hefty dose of customization as well as make this component easier for new users to navigate. We added drag-and-drop organization for sites and topics,a dead-simple folder structure to help you customize your news even more, and made sure that when you follow something new your navigation updates instantly. For those of you who’ve been concerned about leaving your RSS reader behind, this update should help ease the transition. Now you can keep your organizational standards and get all the great perks that come with a system that’s been built social from the ground up.

Notifications Functionality

We know that constant email updates can get annoying. But we also know that you like to be told when something cool happens, or if you’ve achieved a cool new reward. Our solution to this Catch-22 is the new notifications feature, which lets you know when good things happen without interrupting your experience on the site. Now, when you get a private message, unlock a reward, receive a recommendation or gain a new follower, you’ll get a notification that lets you easily view the update and take action. If you want to see all your notifications, just click on the link to at the bottom of the dropdown. And don’t forget to share!

Recommend Sites, People, and Topics

After seeing so many people evangelize their favorite sites on Pinyadda,  tell us about their go-to topic feeds and suggest users your friends should follow, we wanted to be sure to provide an easy way to recommend the stuff you’re into to your friends and colleagues. Now, all you need to do is go to an individual site or topic feed or someone’s profile, click the gears button at the top right, and click “Recommend.” You’ll be prompted to select whether you want to send a recommendation to all your followers, or just to individual people (you can even enter an email address of a user not on Pinyadda). They’ll receive your recommendation in their notification tab at the top.

Redesigned Search Feature

We all have a pretty good idea of how a search function is supposed to work, and we needed to make ours do what our users thought it would. You gave us a lot of feedback on this one and the result is a simplified search box, auto-suggest feature, and redesigned results page does a much better job of helping you quickly find what you’re looking for. Whether you’re searching for articles, people, sites, or topics, just type your query into the box and we’ll do our best to read your mind. If you don’t see what you’re looking for in the auto-suggest field, just hit the enter key and you’ll be given a full page of sortable results.

Updated Information Architecture

This is a fancy way of saying we moved a few menu options to a place where they make more sense. If you’re trying to add a link to Pinyadda or submit an RSS feed for your favorite blog, you can now find those options under the Newsstand dropdown. See what we did there? The newsstand is as much yours as it is ours, and we wanted to make sure we made that clear.

While we know change is sometimes hard to deal with, we hope you all like these updates. They’re drawn in large part from your fantastic feedback and we continue to be incredibly grateful to have a such an engaged, dedicated, and thoughtful community. And please, let us know what you think! There’s a whole lot more great stuff on the horizon and we’ll be sure to share more soon.

Love,

The Yadda Squad