New CleanTechnica Feature: Quick Cleantech News

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Hello! As you might have already noticed, we’ve got a new widget on the right side of the page — a “Quick Cleantech News” widget. We started working on this before conducting the recent reader survey, and the idea has been on my mind for ages, but I was especially happy we were creating it after seeing our reader survey results.

Our 2012 reader survey (and our 2011 survey, for that matter) showed a pretty even split between those who want a relatively higher number of posts (with relatively less depth/originality) and those who don’t want us posting so much (and want relatively more depth/originality). It was about 45% to 45%. While most people indicated in a future question that they wanted us to publish 8 posts or fewer a day, there are still a lot of readers who want a lot more posts. Plus, it’s clear that there’s demand for stories on a wide variety of cleantech topics, which you just can’t adequately provide with a handful of posts a day.

We have a solution! (Of sorts.)

When we publish pieces (quick pieces) to the Cleantech News category, they don’t feed into our home page’s main column — they just feed to that category page and that Quick Cleantech News widget that you can see on the right side of all our pages.

So, people who want more news can keep their eyes on that, while people who want less news can just keep their eyes on our main column. Of course, if you’re only interested in one or two categories, you can also just bookmark those category pages and skip the home page altogether.

Unfortunately, if you happen to be an RSS or email subscriber and don’t want to be exposed to so many articles, that’s not really an option at this point. Everything is being fed into the RSS/email feed. So, you’re either going to have to scan through numerous articles a day to find the ones you are really interested in, or you can just jump to the home page daily and see what’s in the main column. (It seems that most readers access the site by visiting it directly anyway, so it can’t be such a pain. ;))

Sound good? Hope so! I’m excited about it.

As you can see above and on the right, the initial Quick Cleantech News posts are:

• New Solar Tracking & Energy Storage Solution
• Turn Signals for Bicyclists! (DIY)
• Renault Delivering Free Electric Vehicle Chargers in France
• Updated i3 and New i Pedelec Electric Bicycle Unveiled by BMW in London
• Lower Subsidies = Larger Solar Power Plants in UK?