Let me tell you a story.

Occasionally, people ask how 10stripe chooses what topics to cover. Many sites, for instance, follow whatever is getting attention in the news (or the news within their niche, anyway) and write something about that. Others have a predetermined schedule. 10stripe does not do these things.

Recently I read a book (Where Wizards Stay Up Late) about, essentially, how the Internet came to be. This was mainly a history of the ARPANET, which preceded the Internet. This got me thinking about ARPANET a bit and, a few days with Google later, I found that there were actually a series of maps of the network's growth that were produced for a report from a contractor to ARPA. After some more time with Google, I had the report (and the maps) in hand. After some fiddling it occurred to me that a lot of interesting things could be done with these maps. And just like that, I had committed 10stripe to producing a series of Flash-based maps of ARPANET, as well as some other related things. The series will take a few weeks to complete.

The moral of the story is that 10stripe has, essentially, no process for these things. Interesting-sounding ideas, wherever they may come from, get written, or drawn, or what have you.

So if you have a deep interest in ARPANET, this should be an interesting month for you. And if not, don't worry. We will, as always, be publishing an unpredictable mix of all sorts of things. But a few of them will involve the ARPANET.

So, well, there are a few of these missing. Ahem.

It's a new year, and 10stripe has been busy. When we're not recapping the entire year for you, we're giving you shopping advice. And efforts to dramatically expand the Big Processor Guide are rumbling along as usual. The holidays slowed down the normal publishing schedule for a while, but it should be (mostly) back on track now.

"Mostly" because there are some large projects coming down the pipe, and those have a way of interfering with the normal schedule. As already mentioned, the Big Processor Guide is getting much bigger. Another, brand-new Big Guide is also on the way. And the visual layout of the site is due for another overhaul (but nothing too dramatic).

Since this is a new year, how about a few notes on the past year? Average daily traffic at the end of 2008 was roughly twice average daily traffic at the end of 2007, mainly on the back of increased Google traffic. A little boost from the German Wikipedia didn't hurt, either. The distribution of traffic changed quite a bit, as well: where the site's main index page was once the most popular on the site, it's no longer in the top 5. The most popular? The Quick PCI-Express 2.0 Guide, again mostly due to Google traffic. And whether you noticed it or not, we added a number of new items to the Bookshelf ad system to keep the repetition down.

Here's to an eventful 2009!

Consider this past month an apology for the one before it.

Yes, July saw 2 consecutive reruns on the front page. But August saw 2 major overhauls of 2 different Big Guides, one promised and one a surprise. And such updates are, on the whole, quite large undertakings.

Speaking of which, updates to the Big Processor Guide are steaming along. Expect to see something more on that this month. That news is unfortunately tempered by the fact that next Tuesday's update may once again be a rerun. But hey, we'll make sure it's a good one.

Two reruns in a single month? What is the world coming to?

Outside issues got in the way of the normal update schedule this month, and so you, dear reader, were left with 2 reruns mixed in to the new content. It may even happen again once next month, but never mind that for now.

Probably the most interesting new release of the past month asked the question Where do they get their codenames? This initially seemed like a fairly straightforward article to tackle, but AMD threw a wrench in the works with their numerous approaches to codenames. Unraveling that proved to be a bit of a challenge, but revealed a few surprises.

The recent release of Centrino 2 has provided enough motivation for a significant overhaul of the Big Platform Guide, which has not seen any major revisions in some time. That will probably be within the next week or two.

Speaking of updates to Big Guides, plans to expand the Big Processor Guide are rolling right along. Expect to see more on that later in the month.

The year is half over already?

June was a less geeky month than usual; pieces like The Quick Headphone Guide are not too terribly technical, especially compared to some 10stripe content. But then, that trend reversed on July 1 with an article on semiconductor process size. So it's really still the same 10stripe.

That's not to say there aren't any changes going on. 10stripe got a new logo this month, replacing the one adopted two years ago when the site changed names. That is perhaps not the most earth-shaking thing ever, but it actually was a little while in the making. As it turns out, this sort of thing is not trivial, particularly when keeping up the 10stripe traditions of being very picky and completely broke.

There's no real plan for what will be published this month, so we'll see what turns up after the holiday weekend.

Several changes to the visual design of the site have recently bubbled up to the top of the queue. For several related-but-not-interesting reasons, we have decided to package all of these together into a single June Refresh. The refresh will go live sometime this week, after a few last things are ironed out. Expect to see:

• A new, slightly prettier jumpbar (that horizontal bar immediately below the content of each article, with "previous" and "next" links)
• A new version of the logo. It will still be a logotype, but we are changing fonts (and some other details) to improve readability at small sizes, which is currently terrible.
• Speaking of fonts, the page fonts are all changing from Verdana to Arial. Exciting stuff.
• Various back-end changes that you don't care about.

There will also be adjustments to 10blog's CSS and logo (it will finally have its own unique logo), and several minor changes.

Long-time readers may remember that this is not the first June refresh that we've done; the more notable one (in 2006) was when the site took on the name 10stripe.

It's that time again.

This was a slightly map-heavy month, with both the map of power systems and the map of personal computers per capita. Next month will not be, for the benefit of those of you that simply hate maps.

There was a different, more notable update this month: The Big Form Factor Guide. I know, I know, form factors are by no means the most exciting topic that we have ever covered. This was notable form two reasons. The first is that Big Guides are rare enough to be inherently notable (we release between one and two per year). The second is that the "born on" dates on those pages are accurate: January 2007. This guide had been sitting in limbo for about 15 months. One of the quirks of 10stripe's (lack of a) production process is that ideas can sometimes sit on a back burner for quite a while... even more than a year. Most ideas that are "stuck" for so long end up being tossed. But this one survived, and eventually made it to a public release.

This next month should hold a few little surprises. A new guide (of yet-to-be-determined size) is coming, with an uncommonly (for us) large number of images. Some subtle tweaks and facelifts throughout the site are on track to go live this month (if you happened to visit at just the right time last week, you might have seen some of the results of our CSS tinkering). Maps have already received a minor facelift. The mapping software that we use recently had a new version release, and we will be making that upgrade shortly.

Firstly, yes, we missed the Monthly Renewal last month. Outside concerns interfered with the normal cycle. It will not happen again (not that we expected it to happen before).

For similar reasons, this was a fairly quiet month. No great upheavels. Perhaps the most revolutionary thing was the Perl-Centric Regular Expression Cheat-Sheet, which was our first real foray into something specifically intended for print. If all goes as intended, it will not be our last. More on that as it develops.

May will, similarly, be a fairly quiet month. Still waters run deep, and all that. A new Big Guide (or two) is rumbling its way toward completion, as are some smaller things. We have as usual been making some changes on the back-end that either have no impact on you, or will not have any impact for a while.

There are also several much larger projects working their way toward being announced, which you will hear more about just as soon as we are ready to really talk about them. Suffice it to say that they are incredibly, lost-sleep-inducingly, frighteningly big projects. Normally we delay announcing projects because 10stripe tends to cancel a lot of projects (most of them, in fact) very early. In this case, it is more that we just like to surprise you.

Some of those projects are heavily inter-related, and are also related to some changes elsewhere in the site, but, well, more on all that at a later date.

We thought the updates to the Map of Semiconductor Fabs would be done in time for this week's update, but unfortunately circumstances conspired against us. The map has been partially updated (a few things have been added and tweaked, and the legend is now properly alphabetized), but there is a great deal more to come.

Nonetheless, it seemed like a good opportunity to launch another new feature we had been planning: Timelines. This week's Timeline of Major Microarchitectures chronicles the various microarchitectures that AMD, Intel, and VIA have used through the years. This was actually a very interesting (and quick) little project, and laying everything out this way really makes it easier to track the (recent) history.

More timelines are on the way. For the next 2-3 months we will probably run a schedule where once a month the update is a timeline, and once a month it is an excerpt from the expanded Big Processor Guide, as The Quick Transmeta Guide was. The remaining updates will be the usual random stuff. We are trying to maintain some balance in the types of content we provide, although that doesn't always work out.

A small footnote: Last week's update inadvertently broke the RSS feed, which has now been fixed.

A really frightening amount of stuff is going on at 10stripe, and I wanted to share a little bit of information here.

Firstly, the Map of Semiconductor Fabs is in the shop for an update, with more fabs. That will be this Tuesday's update if all goes as intended.

In the spirit of the recent wireless technologies comparison, we have a few more visually-oriented updates coming up. More on that later.

But what really drove me to write this post was The Big Processor Guide, which as I've mentioned previously is going through a massive expansion. I also mentioned previously that there was a surprise in store related to that Guide; I'm afraid that will remain a surprise (but not for too much longer, I promise). I have a slightly smaller announcement to make first.

Currently, the Big Processor Guide exists as a series of flat HTML files (with a little PHP thrown in). But as it has grown, and continues to grow, it has become evident that this arrangement needs to change. To that end, we are currently working to transition the Guide to running from a database backend. This will help accomodate its burgeoning size better, and also help the Big Surprise work out better. But you might be more interested in what it will mean in the short term. One of the nice side-effects of a database back-end is that we will be able to provide new tools to help you drill down to just the things you are interested in, and more easily compare different chips. If you've ever used Newegg's Advanced Search and Power Search (try them here if you're not familiar), you'll have a good idea of what we intend to provide.

For the curious, the database system will be powered by the CakePHP framework. After looking at several possible frameworks (because developing everything from the ground up would have been far too much work), we settled on CakePHP because it is a surprisingly easy framework to get started with. In fact, what sealed the deal was an example of creating a simple bookmark manager with CakePHP scaffolding that took about a minute to follow. Nifty stuff.

I want to emphasize again that this is not the Big Surprise, just a small announcement to keep you up to speed on what we are working on.