It’s All About the Orange
There are some weeks when I sit down to write this blog and I just don’t know what to say. It’s not that things aren’t always happening at the SitePoint forums, but sometimes those things are probably only interesting to me. Or I’m not quite ready to go public with them. Or the amount of wine that I drank on Sunday afternoon makes it hard to remember what I did all week. But not today. Today there is SO much going on in our SitePoint community that I don’t know where to start.
Because I’ve been accused lately of not being true to my titles, I’d better start with orange — so that means the forums. There are a couple of aesthetic changes that have taken place over the last week. The most obvious of those is the colour of stickies (the threads marked ‘Important’ at the top of each forum). We have had a drive lately to clean up those threads so that they are up to date and relevant. Now we’re hoping that more people will notice them and use them as they are intended – to provide FAQ type information. So if you have a question that you’re sure must have been asked before, have a quick search through the stickies before asking it. And don’t take offence if we suggest that you look there.
I should also note that there has been a bit of a public backlash against the ‘salmon-ness’ of the colour so we’ll tone it down a bit during the week.
And more on the subject of orange… we have a new ‘flag post’ icon in the place of the old ‘report post’ one. Your feedback made it clear to us that people were unsure under what circumstances it was appropriate to report a post. We have been asking you for a while to report posts that you believe need moderator attention for any reason. We need your help to keep the forums friendly and free of fluff and spam, so I am hoping that the new icon will make things a bit less daunting.
Enough admin – now for the exciting stuff. Today marks the second to last day of the Official SitePoint T-shirt Competition. The entries have been pouring in and there are some really amazing ones. It is going to be a hard call to pick just five, but that’s what I’ll be doing tomorrow. Keep an eye on the News and Announcements forum over the next couple of days – you’ll have the opportunity to take part in a poll to decide on the winner.
One thing that I’ve been putting lots of energy into lately is our Facebook fan page. It has been paying off and we have just hit the 5000 fan mark. I’m pretty pleased with that achievement. One of the things that has proven to be super popular with our Facebook fans is our SitePoint ‘I <3 HTML’ coffee mug. We gave one away a couple of weeks back and by all accounts people are keen to get their hands on one of their own. So now you can. Check them out in our Zazzle store.
And finally, good luck to all those people that start PHP Live today. I hope you find it challenging and enjoyable. For those of you that are more interested in how things look than how they work, check out CSS Live, which is due to start in July.
Hot Topics This Week
This one is very close to my heart… in the Social Networking and Communities forum we are discussing my latest (ok, my only) article entitled How To Be A Great Online Community Member. You’ll find the article here.
The geeks are asking questions about getters and setters over in the PHP Application Design forum. I’m steering clear of that one.
What are your thoughts on content accessibility? If you’ve got some, go and join the thread in the Accessibility and Usability forum.
And for those of you that want something entertaining to listen to during your coffee break, here is one for you. In News and Announcements we hear that The SitePoint Forumcast: After Hours Episode 2 is out.
I could go on forever, but there’s a high chance that that would get boring, so I’ll sign off. Ciao.
Feature image by Chris Roberts from Digital Precision
