Coming Attractions is a new 10blog feature to provide a look at content that we will be publishing soon. Expect to see it once a month or so.

Here are some of the things rising to the top of the stack:

1. An article explaining, in grisly detail, why dialup modems top out at 56 kbps. This will probably go live without images on Tuesday (New Year's Day), with illustrations to follow shortly thereafter. If things go better than planned, it may launch with all illustrations in place.

2. A map showing the life of a PIC microcontroller. This is considered complete, but of minor importance, so expect it to go live before long.

3. A map showing the countries that various country top-level domains (ccTLDs) belong to. This is only getting started now, but should be ready fairly soon. We will be launching a simple version as soon as possible, with a more powerful version (using a touch of Javascript magic) to follow.

This is only a sampling of the things currently percolating to the top. I wanted to share these specific items for two reasons. Firstly, they are all very near publishing, which of course is the point of these "coming attractions" posts (otherwise we would just publish a link to the massive "in development" list).

Secondly, they demonstrate some trends. The first trend is a gentle shift toward a "publish early, publish often" mentality, with more "not quite done" content being made public. The second trend is more mundane: we are trying (trying!) to start publishing something approximately every Tuesday, with occasional items on Thursdays and minor items (like the recent DRM-Free Music Directory update) whenever they come up.

Some readers may remember that 10stripe once experimented with ads powered by the Google Adsense network. We eventually concluded that the ads were more annoying and less useful to readers than we had originally hoped, and dropped them.

But ads are making something of a comeback at 10stripe, albeit in a different form. These new ads are different in several important ways:

1. They will link to specific products at Amazon.com
2. They will contain unobtrusive graphics (gasp!)
3. We will have complete control over where the links go

Web ads, in general, suck. They are annoying, distracting, and rarely of any value. It was very important to us that our ads break that paradigm of "junk that readers dislike". In fact, what originally attracted us to Adsense (and later to Amazon's affiliate program) was the sense that the ads might actually be for things that readers would want to see.

Adsense ads mostly fell down on this point. Our content, it seems, was befuddling to Google's algorithms. A considerable number of the ads were for completely unrelated things. Those that were related were generally to sites like Intel.com (which is fine, but not generally helpful), or to retailers selling related products (again fine, although they often were not the highest-quality retailers). For these and other reasons, we dropped Adsense.

But a funny thing happened several days ago. I was reading something that mentioned Amazon Associates, Amazon's affiliate program. I ended up looking into it and finding that it actually looked like a decent program, and a good match for 10stripe.

So 10stripe will be gradually rolling out ads that show an Amazon.com product (including price) with a link to learn more about the product, and buy it if you like. Due to some of the idiosyncracies of our infrastructure, the ads will appear on a page-by-page basis, over the course of perhaps a week. If you want to see what they look like, glance over to the right side of this page.

Full details are available at Help: Bookshelf.

As promised, here are some of the things going on at 10stripe right now:

10blog theming

Now that 10blog is up, we are working quickly to generate a theme consistent with the rest of 10stripe. Fortunately, this is not all that difficult right now. 10stripe has been planning to launch a project based on a different CMS-ish platform (look for more on this in the future) for several months, and will probably be moving mainspace content to a CMS (see below); for those reasons, we have already done a lot of CSS work that makes this vastly easier. Factoring in time to repair some of Wordpress's brain damage, we still hope to have this done within the next few hours.

Moving 10stripe to a CMS

10stripe has gotten progressively bigger over time, and it is starting to look like moving to a CMS would make life easier. There are several common CMS features (automagic RSS feeds are a big one) that would help us a great deal. Most of the ground work for this is already in place, but we haven't picked a CMS yet. Joomla and Drupal look like the big contenders right now. We will be launching trial sites for both in the next week or so.

New webhost

Our 1-year contract with Dreamhost will be expiring toward the end of January, and we will not be renewing. Again, no final decisions have been made yet, although JodoHost looks like the favorite at this point.

And much more

These are some of the broad-brush things that are happening, although this list is not really all-inclusive. It also completely skips over content that is under development (in grand 10stripe tradition, there are quite a few under development right now), which we will try to cover in another post in the near future.

Recently, 10stripe's front page has been home to a variety of "meta" content. That is, content about 10stripe itself. This has gradually started to cause more and more problems, inspiring us to launch this little blog.

We have launched 10blog in an effort to give that type of content a place to live.
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