The LIVESTRONG.COM Blog

Our developers have been working as hard as ever, and last night they rolled out our biggest release since launch, containing dozens of fixes, features, and improvements. Here’s a sampling:

1. Better Group categorization. Now, when browsing groups, you can drill down by category into subcategories.

2. Better MyPlate layout. We’ve improved the layout for those of you who use The Daily Plate to track the foods you eat each day. By removing an ad, we’ve gotten the important data you care about higher up on the page. More improvements for that page are in store!

3. Fix for profile links from Forums. There had been a glitch with linking from usernames on the forums to a member’s profile. That has been fixed.

4. Vitamin / supplement page improvements. Some links from those pages hadn’t been working properly; they now are.

5. Increased limit for length of Group posts. Some members wished they could write longer missives in Group blogs and comments. We’ve upped the limit on post-size by a big margin. Write away!

6. Search improvements. You’ve no doubt realized that LIVESTRONG.COM has simply tons of content. We discovered not all of our article categories were appearing in search results when you search the site with that bar at the top. That’s now corrected!

7. Video player refinements. We’ve tweaked the video player we use on the site to make it a bit sleeker.

8. WYSIWYG text editor for Groups. WYSI-what now? Don’t worry, some of our own staffers didn’t know that term. It stands for “What You See Is What You Get,” and it refers to a fancier text editor that resembles Microsoft Word. That’ll make posting in Groups even easier, since you can use nice formatting without needing to know a lick of HTML. (Note that our current WYSIWYG editor doesn’t work in all browsers. If your browser doesn’t support it, you’ll just see a regular text entry box.)

UPDATE: There had been an issue with posting replies to Group posts. That has since been resolved.

There are plenty more under-the-hood fixes, and we’re working on a lot more. We’ll be posting a nice long list with everything we’re working on soon, which should help you stay informed about what’s coming here on the site. We value your feedback; let us know what you think!

As you probably know, LIVESTRONG.COM has a team of experts who share their insights with our community. Among them is Dr. Laurie Marbas, a family medicine physician and United States Air Force Officer.

Her professional experience includes patient care in Texas, Virginia and in the Middle East when deployed with the USAF. Her special interests include sports medicine, breast and skin cancer, and health and fitness education. In addition to her work, Dr. Laurie is the mother active children.

Somehow, in between her work and her family, Dr. Laurie finds time to answer health-related questions from our members in a recurring feature on our forums that we call “Ask Dr. Laurie.” Check out her latest batch of answers here, and even post a question of your own that she may answer next time!

Here are the latest fixes and additions!

Search results for foods and brands under The Daily Plate on LIVESTRONG now behave more accurately.

Adding meals to MyPlate now works identically to adding foods; the meal is added in the “expanded” state so that you can quickly adjust its servings.

The water tracker image now defaults to the right number of glasses when you come back to MyPlate, instead of starting with the empty water glass if you’ve already tracked water.

The forum font is now less enormous. (We have noted an issue where some members don’t see the forums at all. If you have a forum issue, please let us know here and be sure to mention your username!)

We’ve also added search links and other useful shortcuts to the top of the forum navigation.