Fresh into civilization after 5 long days, I took the opportunity to login to the Nuffnang Admin, only to be smacked with a complete revamp of the site. I had heard of Nuffnang 2.0 but I did not expect it to arrive so quickly. Refurnished in CSS and Ajax, it is spotting shades of stylish purple in addition to a better defined logo.

From what I have seen so far, Nuffnang 2.0 is more than just a mere face lift, it is something much much more.

One of their latest additions is a blog aggregator called Innit. It functions in a way similarly to site update services like Technorati and Ping.sg. Posts from blogs using Nuffnang are listed on their main site; another traffic route to your blog, why not?

The only downside to it is that I have to manually insert my post if I want it displayed on Nuffnang. Why can’t there be automation like how it is done with the other sites through a ping service?

I like the way how they have elaborated on how the stats are displayed; right down to the details. In the past, they would simply keep a track of how many visits and unique visitors there are, now I can break it down to the specific hours.

The inclusion of the Ajax functionality present in the site was no surprise. They are making a step forward into web 2.0 by incorporating this technology in it. Ajax not only gives a sleek look but it also saves the trouble of visitors having to wait for the entire page to refresh.

I just did a XHTML Transitional validation of the website and to my disappointment, it was showing 11 errors. In my view, web standards validation is the most important element of every site. Irregardless of how elegant or functional a site is, if it is not adhering to web standards, it cannot be considered moving forward into the new age.

With all that being said, Nuffnang 2.0 is still in a beta stage and an evaluation right now would be premature. I hope they can put things right and validate the site. Really looking forward to how Nuffnang will advance, both on a user and web developer’s level.