Huge Site Update

What is up?!

Tons of new features just dropped on the site here, and I'm pumped to run them down for you:

• Favorites! You guys asked for it and it's here. On any recipe, video, photo, blog, or topic, you can click "Save as Favorite", and that thing'll show up in your favorites section. You can access your favorites from the user menu under the "More" link on the right.
• User icon overlays: These work a lot like Flickr's do, except that you can mouse-over just about every user icon around the site. Clicking a user icon will bring up a mini-menu with three new options.
  • Start Watching: Now you can keep up with the people who post the stuff you like. If you choose to "watch" someone, you'll be notified every time they add a new photo, recipe, blog, or anything else. You can even watch topics in the forums, so you'll be informed whenever a new reply is added to a thread you're into.
  • Send a Message: We've added Private Messaging! Click this link (also shows up on user profiles) to pop up an instant message dialog. Messages show up in the Inbox, accessible from the user menu at right.
  • Add as Contact: We've introduced a casual way to connect with each other. This is not a friend request system -- it's a convenience system. As FoodProof grows, we want to be able to keep the people we like close at hand. Once you've added some contacts, you'll see a new green "Contacts" menu on the right side. Click it for easy private messaging and access to your contacts' profiles.
• Better quality videos: We were frustrated by how pixelly things were looking, so we upped the quality quite a bit, and have reprocessed all of the old videos. They look way better, so check them out!
• Recipe ingredients: These should no longer be singularized, and should respect your capitalization.
• Recipe Printing: You asked for this one too, and it's totally reasonable. You can now print out recipes in a pretty clean format. We're going to look into other formats, like index card style, and maybe more plain-text styles for older printers, but let us know what you think about the new "Printer-friendly" version.
• My Unpublished: You'll now have a quick link on the right menu to view your unpublished blogs, recipes, etc, so you don't lose the drafts you're working on.
• Quick Topic Posting: From any forum page, you can now post a new topic really quickly, using the new pop-up form. Try it out!
• Feeds: We've fixed the RSS feeds and have added photo thumbnails into them too.
  
• Full-screen image browsing: Looks much nicer now, we think.
• Tons more seriously worthwhile stuff that we've fixed or added but have forgotten!

And hey, we're going to start a launch countdown sometime soon! We're pushing towards a public launch in the next week or two, and will be putting as many finishing touches on the site as we can during that time. As always, leave your suggestions and comments and bug reports with us in the forums!