What I'm talking about is functionality and not colors, graphic art, etc.
I've been saving these up for a long time, and have collected them together into a single diary; it's been a while since we've had a diary that brainstorms about these type of things. I keep putting it off because there are so many important things going down.
But, on the other hand, DKos keeps growing and so we should also want to make it as good as we can.
1st suggestion: Why not have a link at the bottom of the recommended diaries pane saying "theres more..." and linking to previous recommended diaries in chronological order.
Sometimes I have been away for a few days and I want to see what the most important diaries were during the period I was gone. Also, sometimes I have been reading a recommended and had to run out the door for something. When I get back, it's gone and is no longer in the 50 most recent. If I can't recal some phrase or who the diarist was I can't get back to it with ease.
2nd suggestion: I know how to see a list of all the comments I have rated, but there seems not to be anything that would allow me to see a list of all the diaries I have recommended. This would be fun and convenient. There are many times I am struggling to remember some dairy I had really liked and that I know I've recommended but I can't quite remember enough details about to access it. This could be in the form of an additional tab entitled "recommendations" in the user page (perhaps located between "ratings" and "subscription").
3rd suggestion: Start a suggestion box where we could make just these sorts of suggestions. It would be nice if other people's suggestions could be accessed and commented upon as well.
4th suggestion: Well, actually this may be a bug report. When I recently checked to see who had rated my comments I found that all my comments which have a (none / 1) actually had 2 ratings. Comments listed as (4.00 / 2) had actually been rated by 3 people (all 4s). And a comments with (4.00 / 15) had actually received 16 4s. IN other words, my listed ratings always gave the number of actual ratings minus one.
But when I randomly checked other people's comment ratings I did not find this same thing happening. I thought maybe the bug would only appear if I was logged in and so I logged out and found the exact same thing.
5th suggestion: Add a link on the home page for reporting bugs. I know that this is an option within "contact us" link, but it might be useful to make it more prominent.
6th suggestion: Make the site more searchable! For me this is the grandaddy of all suggestions, because the search function is very hard to use and does not produce useful results. Why not simply set up a Google-powered search within the search page?