Slashdot Updates

Well I guess this is todays changelog: First, my space heater is busted so I can't feal my fingers very well. Second, "Light" and "No Icon" options are in the user preferences. Combined with with "No Boxes" and setting your mode to NoComment, you should have a Slashdot that will work on extremely minimal browsers. Comments probably will still die in light mode (and still require a table) but I'll work that out later. Hit the link to read about changes to various Slashboxes. We added several boxes including Weather24 Happy Penguin, Frag.com, MetaCrawler, IMDB (Updated to include this weeks releases) LinuxHQ (gets current kernel versions) MozillaZine, Userland, BeOS Central and x86.org. Several other boxes were updated, fixed or modified. We've got a large handful left to do, but most of them don't have public backends. If you know of cool sites with public backends, let us know. I've got almost all the sites I desire hugely except gnome.org and aint-it-cool-news.

I still have a bit more I want to do with the customization stuff. Mainly I'd like the ability to snarf RDF pages, and allow users to publish their own User Space blocks if they have some interesting content worth sharing with other readers.

After that, the moderation system is getting an overhaul. We're going to offer an experimental new system that will allow any registered user to participate (the old system will remain unchanged for the die hards, so no fear).

We've had 7500 new accounts created in the last couple days. Almost 5000 of them are using the new config stuff. I'm pretty pleased with that. And after the massive overload yesterday, the server has returned to a reasonable load. We are getting 2 more servers and will start distributing the load soon. That'll help even more, but I bet our existing setup could handle 600,000-700,000 pages a day without really blinking. We'll see how much we grow.

I cleaned up a lot of nasty old code today. I probably caused a few nasty new bugs in the process. If anything funky goes down, lemme know. Particularly with comment display and browsing.

Lastly, Richard Thieme's beta test went well. He'll be taking next week off, and then be posting regular columns each thursday for awhile. We'll see how that goes. I think it'll be pretty cool.

Unrelated:I bought another guitar yesterday. Its a 12 string acoustic fender with a damaged case so I got a ridiculously good deal. Having never owned either an acoustic guitar, or a 12 string, I'm quite enchanted with it. Twice as many strings means rob can suck with fuller sound.