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.

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.

Joomla 1.5 is now officially "stable" (it has been for a few days, but we just noticed today). Some early poke-and-prod testing indicates it should be up to the task of being 10stripe's CMS. Expect to see more about this soon.

On a related note, I have to say I am extremely disappointed that Joomla 1.5 seems to have carried over the "use a table for everything" disease. The page source for the default homepage is a really impressive disaster. Hopefully we will be able to coerce it into doing the Right Thing.

10stripe has officially changed webhosts, and as of right now all public services have been restored. Files were copied over and nameservers were changed yesterday; 10blog was the last thing to be brought back up.

We are still working out some small issues getting the 10blog theme back to what it was, but this should be resolved shortly. If you are having any issues, please leave a comment on this entry.

For those that are curious, the big winner was KnownHost.

First of all, I am currently recovering from a moderate case of the flu. Even still, today we brought you the Clicky Keyboard Directory, which all things considered sure beats spending 3 days fighting the flu.

We are still shopping for a new webhost. Looking into the matter further has, unfortunately, produced more viable candidates and made the decision harder. But we'll figure it out anyway. Our hosting with Dreamhost is up in exactly two weeks.

Today I woke up to a cheerful email indicating that Dreamhost had gone ahead and billed us for another year of service, which turned out to be the result of a rather large billing snafu on their part, which has since been fixed. To their credit, they wasted no time in acknowledging that they screwed up (and big), and had our account sorted out by the end of the business day.

I've been playing with Joomla a bit over the last few days. The back-end interface is impressively overcomplicated, and the default theme is antithetical to the 10stripe aesthetic, but overall it has been a reasonably good experience. The major sticking point right now is that the URLs that it generates are very, very unfriendly. There is a setting to make them less horrible, but still no good, and there are various extensions to improve the situation (which are helpfully incompatible with many other extensions). Here are some example "friendly" URLs:

http://www.site.com/component/option,com_contact/Itemid,3/
http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,listcats/cat_id,1803/Itemid,35/

But fortunately, version 1.5 (which the tea leaves say should be declared "stable" quite soon) is supposed to do better. If 1.5 goes official soon, and can generate "pretty URLs" of similar clarity to the Wordpress format used by this blog, there is a good chance we will end up moving to Joomla as our primary platform.

The other item mentioned in the last What's going on? was the theming for this blog, which is now mostly complete. Comments may get a little more tweaking, but otherwise you should not expect any significant modifications.

That basically covers all of the goings-on around the site right now. Once we switch hosts things will start to move faster, particularly if Joomla 1.5 goes gold soon. We also have some other projects, ranging from quite small to quite large, that are on pause until the hosting situation is taken care of. Stay tuned.

The TLD locator is now "done enough", which is to say that it is ready for publication despite one outstanding bug. We will be working to fix or work around this bug over the next few days.

The Bookshelf ads are randomly displaying an ugly animated ad for Amazon.com (not a product, just Amazon generically). We have contacted Amazon about fixing this.

10stripe will be changing webhosts later this month. Expect to see several more announcements about this. There may be a mild service interruption due to DNS propagation, but we will work to make the transition as smooth as possible.

Intel has officially announced a slew of new products, so the Big Processor Guide will be updated sometime this week.

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.