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.