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.

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.

Another month, another of these posts.

This has been a quiet month, in terms of things going on on the surface. A series of updates dealing with common-but-not-incredibly-exciting issues, and no major upheavals in the way the site looks or works. Standard stuff, right?

In the background, things are much more interesting. Plans for the new, bigger Big Processor Guide are rolling along nicely, and there will be some major surprises in store. The surprises will be in a future post; for now, I can talk about the less surprising things.

First I want to talk about the evolution of the Big Processor Guide, because it is indicative of how things tend to work for 10stripe. In its original form, the guide was solely about AMD's recent (at the time) x86 processors. Then it was expanded to cover their older stuff, and then expanded again to include everything after the 486. Some time later came its largest expansion to date, incorporating Intel's product line over the same period.

Now it is set to be expanded yet again, in two big ways. The first is that it will soon include products from other manufacturers, including Transmeta and Cyrix. The second is that it will, for the first time, include non-x86 processors. POWER is in, SPARC is in, and yes, so is Itanium. This will be a big, big expansion, and so we are moving with some care to ensure that it is not too overwhelming.

There is a good possibility that the net result will be several distinct, interlinked guides. It is too early to say. Stay tuned.

Has it really been a month already?

This has been an inward-facing month for 10stripe. We finally changed web hosts on January 23, which seems to have gone fairly smoothly. All services have now been restored and everything should be working normally. A few minor issues are still being straightened out, but nothing to worry about.

The Bookshelf ads now display a much larger variety of content, on the "seeing the same ad over and over is annoying" theory. They also work on a more extensible system, which you don't care about but I do. There will hopefully be an announcement related to the Bookshelf within the next two weeks or so, but no promises.

We have a few large-ish projects quietly making their way to completion, but also some smaller things that should be done much sooner. We will be trying to bring some interesting hardware projects into the site, but the timeline on that is still not clear. The Big Processor Guide is once again up for a major expansion (for reference, the last such expansion increased its size by a factor of 4 or so) and general improvement. There are a variety of smaller things also bubbling up to the top, but those should give you some idea of where we are heading for the next month or so.

Monthly Renewal is a feature we will be publishing on or about the first day of each month, starting now. The goal of these Renewals is to take a moment to reflect on the overall state of the site and make some small adjustments.

New Year's Eve and Day are traditional days of introspection and resolutions for the future (for Americans, anyway), which is part of why I wanted to publish the first of these on New Year's Day.

The past year has been one of dramatic change for 10stripe. We finally "moved out of mom's basement", as it were, getting our own real web host. We became unexpectedly popular in Eastern Europe thanks to new content like the Quick Windows Vista Guide and Who made your power supply? We also launched the new maps feature late in the year, to a very good reception.

That is not to say that this was a model year. Personal issues forced me to devote a great deal of my time to other matters, especially from March to August, which substantially hurt the site. One of my goals beginning in November, and continuing on into the new year, has been to return the site to a more regular publishing schedule. This has been a challenge for a variety of reasons (not the least of which has been holiday travel). However, I wanted to reaffirm that 10stripe will be working to stick to a more consistent publishing schedule, as follows:

1. New content (what is internally considered "major content") will be published every Tuesday. For practical reasons, this will often be done the Monday evening beforehand. Not every single Tuesday will bring new content, but most will.

2. New content will occasionally be published on Thursdays, or rarely other days in honor of special occasions.

3. Incremental updates ("minor content") to existing content will be published as needed. Most will probably be published on Sundays. As per usual, most of it will not be announced on the front page or blog; it will simply be uploaded in the background. More substantial updates will continue to be mentioned on the front page.

10blog will also be put on something of a schedule:

1. These Monthly Renewal posts will be published on or about the first day of each month. Most of them will be a great deal shorter than this one.

2. Coming Attractions (upcoming content) and What's Going On? (things happening in the background at the site) posts will be published sporadically, probably no more than once per month for each. Expect them mostly on the weekends. If there is demand for more frequent updates, they will become more frequent.

3. Single-purpose, one-off posts will continue to be published whenever they are needed. Most will probably be published on Sundays.

Other business for the new year: As I have mentioned previously, 10stripe is working on a very big new project, which I hope to describe in more detail in February. We also have some smaller, but also quite neat, projects that I will be able to announce soon. And of course we have a veritable torrent of regular content coming your way, including new and better maps.