And I swear, if I ever do this again I will shoot myself in the head - with a BB Gun So what has changed? Mostly stuff behind the scenes that you will hopefully never be aware of. DigitalPulp was my first web application and like all first ventures it was made with the best of intentions and some of the most egregious mistakes. If they had been allowed to continue the site would have ground to a halt.

What you might care about - aside from the nice new styling - is an increased emphasis in the importance of genre in the story reader. I know that to some of you genre is a dirty word, but I've been thinking long and hard about how to get people reading again, and one of the main tools the publishing world uses is the power of anticipation which comes from the g-word. Plus the graphical titles make the site look a little more exciting. A program has been run that randomly assigned a genre to your work based on the elements you chose for them, so you might want to look your work over and make sure it's in the genre where it best fits.

The controls have been more logically arranged, hopefully making them easier to use. Your profile now has different pages attached to it, controlled by links in the upper right hand corner. Through the Gratuity Link you can set your stories up with a paypal donate button and collect a small amount of money from your readers. It probably won't make you rich, but it might warm your day by buying a cup of coffee or two, who knows?

Writing circles and the matter of whether your story is visible or not has been greatly streamlined (and color coded). The picks system has been replaced by a tiered quality meter. And last but not least a new section called "Reads & Reviews" has been added, basically giving the written word a treatment similar to what goes on over at the Rotten Tomatoes movie review site.

Enjoy!