Announcing Customizable Slashdot

The arrival of the new server last week brought spare clock cycles to burn. It was time to make Slashdot customizable. Last thursday I announced the ability to filter the story display, but now, we have full customization of the grey boxes on the right side of the homepage. Currently, things like The Poll and Freshmeat dominate, but now we have a couple dozen interesting boxes to choose from, ranging from the User Friendly to the JenniCam to various search forms and headlines to a few of our favorite sites. Or you can just turn them all off. If you are Logged In and you Edit your Preferences. I'm open to suggestions about new boxes, and in the future we'll be allowing users to make and share their own custom boxes. Course by then hopefully we'll have a few more servers to distribute the load over.

Update: 03/15 11:21 by CT :

You can reorder the boxes with the arrows.

Some new sql index entries and some optimizations have got the server performing near where it was.

Several people have pointed out several bizarre bugs that I'm working on- things relating to turning off selected boxes and stuff. Also note that there is a limit to the number of boxes you can select (the length of the id's can't exceed 255). I'll mess with that later- but it basically limits you to perhaps 15-20 boxes. Probably better to leave it that way just to save bandwidth *grin*