Updates

Matt’s post last night in the forums prompted me to give this site a little long overdue love. While I’m sure he was probably just ranting, I appreciate his sentiments and wanted them to be seen.

First, I’ve updated the forums so they are permanently integrated with the main site and hopefully completely fixed. Now, when you’re logged into the main site, you no longer have to login separately to the forums, or face a white screen after logging in or submitting a new comment or question. They work slightly differently in that the most useful view is probably the Topics view (RSS), which shows the most recent topics while the main Forum view shows the structure of the forums. In theory, it should all be fixed, but then again it is experimental. You still need an account to post on the forums to comment on regular items.

In addition, I often receive questions or comments from readers that should be posted on the web site, but which I don’t have the time to deal with because I have to make a living and they end up just fermenting in my inbox. Right now, I’m catching up on several of these dating back to January, which are below. To make it easier on me, I’ve added a form that allows anyone to submit a news item or question. You do not need to have an account or be logged in to submit these items, but you do have to answer a captcha form question at the bottom. You can also upload an image to illustrate your question or news item. Of course, we still have a contact form where people can submit bugs, ask questions or submit comments they don’t want the whole world to see, but hopefully this will make it simpler for people to get feedback from the community.

For those who might be new, we’re approaching our 10th anniversary in September and I have one more upgrade to do that I hope will allow us to offer even more ways for users to interact. I hope these updates proveto be useful in the interim.