Version 4

Well, here it is. After thinking about a new design and new construction for this website for… oh… about a year, I finally did it. It took me about 2 weeks worth of solid work to complete the site, from design to construction, but the process actually started about 2 months ago.

What’s New
The new design (obviously) took me about 3 attempts. I plan on posting the final PSD of the design that you see here now but I would like to organize it a little before releasing it to the public.

Most of what’s new is in the backend. I’m now running WordPress as my content management system. What you see as a user has (almost) nothing WordPress in it. The “front-end” is a custom template system I’ve been using and developing for a few years now. The only real WordPress features I’m using are the comments. Why? Because of spam filtering.

The Spam
The amount of spam I get on this site is amazing. I removed 3600 spam posts from my comments database last night. 3600. Most of it is spambots but there is an occasional disgruntled user who just likes posting random garbage in forms. With WordPress and a few spam filtering plugins, I’m hoping to cut down the amount of spam greatly. Spam is also the reason the forums are down for now.

The Beta
I didn’t want to post “beta” all over the site because, well, I just like to avoid some bandwagons when I can. In a sense, websites should always be beta, because they should always be changing and updating and getting better. The reason I DO consider this a beta is because I just haven’t worked out all the bugs for the current features.

Where’s the Comments?
Comments can be a blessing and a curse. There’s often times users point out something that I just missed, or mis-spelled, or just a quirk about a function in a tutorial. For that, they are a blessing. This website is my hobby. I don’t have a team of writers or a team of editors. When I get 15 users acting as my editor for one tutorial it helps a lot.

I removed all of the comments from the previous site because most of them were useless. Don’t worry, I can still find them, and plan on using the useful ones. I want to go through all of the old comments and apply anything that can assist (or fix) the tutorial.

All comments are still moderated. All of them. And my moderation is going to be getting stricter. I want to keep useless, hurtful, or completely unnecessary comments to a minimum. This includes praise-type comments also. I’m not being a “fascist” or anything else people want to call me, I’m just trying to keep the site content more relevant now. And it is my site, I can do anything I want