It is true. I myself turned 21 yesterday and now Unmatched Style has turned 1 year old. I myself didn’t have the typical 21 year old party; I was neither sloshed, tanked, wrecked, hammered, screwed, twisted, drunk, crunk, gone or intoxicated (I’ll save that for the weekend when I don’t have to get up and go to work, thank you very much). However, with Unmatched Style I planned this party just right.

New Design

So the big thing was taking on a design that would better house the direction I am taking with the improved installment of Unmatched Style. It was a task that was actually quite treacherous, but I did have some brilliant designers (and developer) helping me out along the way. I will make mention of these people a little bit later today. They may or may not know why I am holding out, but it will all make sense soon enough.

New Non-Design

So besides the design Unmatched Style is now powered by the wonderful WordPress. Movable Type served me well in the past but a lot of what I was looking to do on this site is based on power, speed and flexibility. I needed something that could be a little easier molded into what I had envisioned. Naturally to do this I needed something that could more rapidly allow me to do what I had envisioned; hence WordPress.

Besides the spiffy new content management system, I have developed my own backend that allows me to manage submissions in a more efficient way. Previously submissions were emailed to myself and besides the fact that I was spamming my inbox, that concept is so 2002.

This system is important for 2 reasons. The first being it auto-generates an email letting the submitter know that the submission has been approved or declined, after that, when it is reviewed it sends an email saying that the review has been written and they will see it in the gallery promptly.

The second reason this is important is the fact that I can now give everyone some recognition. It allows me to easily pull this information from the database and display it on the page. This can be seen in the middle column labeled “Recent Submissions.” Gives you guys more sites to look at and is a clever content creation technique.

Democracy on Unmatched Style

This is true in two ways. People have been asking for it for quite sometime. And for the longest time I ruled with an iron fist, nay saying the idea every time I heard it. It started out as a few rebel cries and by the time that I decided to go ahead and consider it; it was a war cry. An army of emails asking for one thing so my tyrannical reign was overthrown and now you are in control…you now have the right to vote.

The voting system is a bit “unrefined” right now as it is a simple WordPress plugin called Votio. I have tweaked the life out of the plugin as it is, yet as I have always planned I see a complete rewrite of this in the near future. The one cool thing is that is based on the XmlHttpRequest and even when I write my own voting system I think it shall stay that way, just because it is pretty darn slick.

Doing the opposite

In a world where gallery sites are giving you a couple of thumbnails that are really small…I dare to say more and bigger. This is crucial because it limits me to a single entry a day. This allows the most recently showcased site to be more noticed and give it more time to shine.

On top of that instead of my cheesy 3 paragraph reviews I am able to focus on one review a day and go a little bit more into detail. I know some people will be disappointed that it will be limited to an entry a day, but it is only fair to those who submit and get listed that they each get an ample time of recognition and time in the spotlight.

More to come

Stay tuned today things are going to get a little crazy. I got another big announcement and some thanks to pay out. And maybe another big announcement to throw your way as well. Welcome to the new era of Unmatched Style…get them votes in fellow citizens.

Note: If you are already subscribed to Unmatched Style’s news feeds you will have to update the URL’s. I truly do apologize for this but I could not avoid it. I did all in my power to preserve the previous convention but errors were inevitable. If a workaround is brought to my attention it will be corrected promptly.