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.

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.

Tuesday's update will be a Quick Guide on the PCI-Express 2.0 spec. PCIe 2.0 equipment is just starting to come on the market, and after reading a series of confused forum posts I realized that the implications of this new(-ish) spec are not generally understood. So we'll try to do something about that. The text was all written over the course of the last few hours, and it will get some extra polish over the long weekend.

We're working on another Directory as well, this one for the Opera web browser. If anyone happens to have any suggestions, we'd love to hear from you in the Comments.

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.

This is just a minor update. The TLD map (showing the countries that ccTLDs are affiliated with) has come together faster than expected. So rather than launching with partial functionality and then being patched up, it will be launching fully-functional. It will be launching on Tuesday (Jan 8) as originally planned.

There is one bug that will be fixed before release, and one more-ornery bug that will probably have to be fixed post-launch. Both are Javascript-related, which is no real surprise.

Also, I have to say that it's a neat little tool. Not that I'm especially unbiased.

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.

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.