Uptown Almanac has been pretty quiet recently—and we do apologize for that—but it was for a fine reason.  Just look around; the blog is (should be?) a whole lot less painful to read and look at.  Finally.

It’s not just a redesign, but we’ve revamped the whole site, including:

• An Improved Commenting System: We’ve overhauled our commenting platform and introduced the ability for San Francisco’s Best Commenters to upload photos and embed videos.  We’re looking forward to this feature being abused to exhaustion until we ultimately remove it.
• You Can Now Read the Site on Your Phone: As much as you loved squinting to read the site while hiding from your boss in the bathroom, UA is now compatible with small screens.
• High-Definition Photos: Our indescribably terrible cell pics will now look great better on devices with high-resolution displays.
• New Blood: Okay, this isn’t site thing per-say, but we’re beefing up our roster of writers (with Jackson West of SFist/Valleywag/NBC/Gigaom fame joining us this week!).

But looking beyond all the internet doodads, the biggest change is we’re moving away from our old blog format.  Over all the years of running this site, we’ve felt that there have been a lot of pieces of news that was important to the conversation, but we didn’t have more to add to what was already reported. So borrowing from blogs and sites like The Awl, Eater, and Tumblr, we’ll be rolling out a series of new post formats that’ll enable us to point you to stories happening elsewhere without wasting time regurgitating other people’s reporting.

Now, it’s worth pointing out there’s still a lot of problems and things left out of this refresh—we still don’t have a footer, author bios are busted, and we’ve wanted to retire our dated slogan for ages.  But these problems aren’t for a lack of proofreading, but rather, we wanted to get what we have up and get back to blogging.  So please consider this our first draft, and please let us know if you have any ideas for how to make UA even better.