Welcome to the New Slashdot

Allright, the new site is up, and just about fully functional. Thanks to everyone who has been just wailing email on me all day (and all last night) with comments/bugs etc. Please follow the link below and read a few points and help me smooth everything out before monday when my spring break is over and I stop having spare time to fix bugs :)

Read the FAQ It's Here. I'm getting like an email every 2 minutes right now, if your message is on the FAQ, hang on a few days before mailing.

800x600 I know a lot of you are hating this. And just as many of you have emailed me saying that the new wide thing is better. All I ask is that every please give the new look a chance. In a week or so I'll run a poll and if the 800x600 loses out, I'll make a narrow version soon. I like the new version better- and lots of of you guys to. And FWIW, I am not using my 21" monitor any more- this site was designed start to finish on an 800x600 laptop. The wide look reduces horizontal scrolling. If in a couple of weeks the majority wants a narrower design, I'll drop the iconbar on the left, and we'll be nice and narrow.

The Grey Background Color I selected Grey to make the page readable under netscape 2, and any other browser which does not support table BGCOLOR tags. I think the black looked better too. I could go either way on this one.

Flicker I've seen this under a few browsers. I'm working on it.

HTML Glitches I'm working on them. Especially the table shifts between the top/middle/bottom tables. It's really tricky because NS3, NS4 and IE3 and IE4 handle each of them differently. Grumble grumble. And NS4 for windows handles it differently than Linux. And if you set your fonts to a different size, the table is different too. and sometimes despite setting the width on a cell, netscape will just resize it anyway and screw everything up. The sad thing is that IE4 handles it much better than Netscape. Anyway, the site looks perfect on my Linux Netscape 4.04, as well as my Netscape 4.04 NT at work. I'll work on compatibility for other browsers as soon as major bugs are squashed.

Threaded Comments Dave has been working hard on them, but we have some major things that need fixing- things that will massively reduce the number of clicks required to read, and that will hopefully make everyone much happier. As soon as I have some spare time, I'll make an option for a 'flat' view as well. Direct bugs about the comments to Dave and he'll try to fix them ASAP. For now though the comments are only about 75% functional- Dave had to disappear for a programming contest that I think he forgot about. When he gets back, we'll get everything ship shape quick.

Speed The site should be noticably faster most of the time. The old CGI had a memory leak, the standard CGI overhead, as well as the overhead of launching and compiling the perl script 20,000 times on a typica day. Now all the articles and the homepage (which accounts for about 75% of the old sites CGI) are now CGI free. And mod_perl rules.

Old Articles I imported 16,000 comments and over a thousand articles. Some of them were deleted due to a problem when we moved from the Alpha to the PC. We still have like 12,000 of the comments and 700 of the articles. The really old ones are gone. Sorry. I'd rather debug than worry about importing stuff that happened 6 months ago. It's like dog years- 6 months ago was Dark Ages by now :)

Lag Time Comment posting might have a 60 second delay. Don't worry if you don't see your comment immediately. Get a cup of coffee, reload and it should work.

META Refresh I'm still open to this. A lot of people requested it after all. If the new speed improvements work well enough, I'll add the META refresh tag to the homepage like y'all keep asking for.

Cookies They are optional. They save you typing. I know some of you think they are hell's spawn but they make a lot of nice things possible that without them just can't happen.

Misc I hope everyone likes things overall. The complete rewrite basically took every spare second of my spring break. While normal college students went to malibu to have casual sex with beautiful women, I drank beer and wrote perl :) Hopefully we'll work the rest of the kinks out in the next week or so and everything will get back to normal.