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.

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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