I’ve made a few design changes to Madison Pike to give it a cleaner Dave Winer-like “River of News” appearance. The site is a news aggregator for Madison, Alabama and the new design cuts out extraneous design elements and does away with the larger blog-style headlines in favor of headlines nested within the paragraphs. I started with Automatic’s relatively new P2 WordPress theme and made a few modifications, including using Google Web Fonts for the masthead.

The P2 theme has a few nice features, including automatically rolling new stories onto the top of the page with a different color background and nested comments directly on the index page. I’m still trying to figure out how to successfully integrate Facebook Connect into this commenting system, which is a problem many people are struggling with.

I’ve also done some work on the back end and the site is now nearly 100% automated and crawls for news updates throughout the day.