It’s been nearly two and half years since we launched The Sacramento Press, and today we released a few changes (more than just the temporary purple color), one of which is removing the beta stamp from our navigation.

What is a beta stamp, you ask? Well, since you can no longer see it on our site, I grabbed this screenshot of what it used to look like.

Notice the "BETA" stamp in the upper left-hand corner. (Image by: Geoff Samek)

Beta generally indicates that a company is still working out the kinks in their core product. But we finally are happy to say we feel pretty happy with what we have, so no more beta!

Does this mean we stop working on new features? Absolutely not. We will in fact bring new and increasingly cool features to The Sacramento Press over the course of this year and beyond.

To that point our co-founder and VP of technology Joel Rosenberg has assembled this quick overview of what else will see changed on our site as of today.

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Highlighting the Comments of an Article's Author

An article author's comments will now stand out in the conversation. This allows readers to quickly know when the writer may be providing greater detail, correcting a mistake, or just jumping into the action.

No more "107 Weeks Ago"

We're changing how we show the age of comments and articles in search results and lists. Currently, we show how old an article is in terms of minutes, hours, days, and weeks. Now we'll be removing weeks, adding months and showing the year and month an article or comment was published if it's more than a year old.

Facebook and Twitter links

We now promote our official Facebook and Twitter account at the top of every page.

Curated front page RSS feeds

We're adding RSS feeds for all laid-out front pages (and tag pages). This allows us to have a feed that represents curated content that is changed daily. We can give these feeds to third parties knowing that spammy or offensive articles won't show up and surprise us.

Trimming down RSS entries when things change

When we have to fix a typo in an article or when a user updates his comment, some RSS readers will often add a new entry instead of updating the old one. This change will help RSS software see changes as updates to old entries, not new entries.

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So there you go, lots of new stuff to play with. In the coming weeks, look for even more changes such as video and audio on our homepage and even more exciting features.