It didn't cost $6 million dollars, however we were actually able to launch a new version of Switch On The Code. It's almost hard to believe, since we've been talking about it for almost a year now.
The original site was built using Wordpress. The new one uses Drupal, which gives us a lot of power and flexibility to create the features we want. The theme was designed and built from scratch, and we think it's a huge improvement over the original.
Better, Stronger, Faster
Speaking of new features, we added two new sections to the main page: "In The News" and "Tutorials Around The Web". There are tons of great resources out there that we'd like to share with the rest of the community, so these provide a quick place for us to post stories and tutorials created by other websites that you might find interesting.
The available space for posts and tutorials has been considerably widened to make the example code easier to format and read. We've also revamped the syntax highlighting to make them consistent across the entire site - and hopefully make them easier on the eyes.
The horrible Wordpress comment system we were using has been replaced by a excellent threaded system. You now have to be logged in to comment. We did this as an anti-spam measure, which should increase the overall quality of the community. Unfortunately, we did not migrate over any of the old Wordpress user accounts, because 99.9% of them were spam accounts (and we were unable to tell the 'real' and 'fake' accounts apart).
If you'd like to tell us or others a little about yourself, we created user profile pages where you can add a profile pic, tell us where you're from, and list your favorite programming languages.
This is just the tip of the ice-berg for the new Switch On The Code. We've got big plans for the future of the site and the community. I'd like to thank all of our readers, emailers, and commenters for helping to make Switch On The Code what it is today.
We really enjoy hearing feedback from our readers, so if you've got any opinions about our site, anything at all, don't hesitate to leave a comment or contact us.
01/13/2009 - 09:59
It was already good before, but now it looks really good.. nice upgrade
01/16/2009 - 01:24
The site seems a bit too crowded with ads now, I think I may have liked the old layout better.. More conservative. Though this is nice.
01/16/2009 - 08:17
Yeah, one of the compromises we made with the new design was that in order to get rid of the ad that was smack in the middle of posts on the old site (which we all really hated, but had a decent ctr), we had to add more ads to other parts of the site.
01/16/2009 - 11:21
Thanks for the feedback. I agree, it is a little crowded at the top of the page. We'll be introducing some new advertising ideas in the near future that might clean it up a little.