I've not been announcing things, but a lot has gone on. 

First off, hosting have been moved to more modern equipment.  In fact, a lot of more modern equipment.  The old server was a single Athlon XP 1800 with 1GB RAM that has been doing it's job for the last 8 years or so.  Sadly it was not up to the job of everything I wanted to put it to. So I've done some upgrades.  We have roughly 20 CPUs now allocated to webserving and video transcoding.  All modernish Core2duo's (2core and 4core variants 2.4GHz to 3.2Ghz).  32GB RAM, 20TB of storage, etc.  A little faster and a little more reliable.  Also allowing me to implement some of the new features.

Feature #1: bitcoin payment processing.

Feature #2: Video viewing/downloading.  We kindof had this before, but now we are using the modern html5 video tag, and transcoding everything you upload to be available on all browsers.  So now you can upload not just photos, but also videos.   They should play in all modern browsers including ipad/etc.

Also I've been working on cleaning up a lot of code and as a result making things faster.  I think we are just about ready for the masses to bombard our servers with their sexiness.

In addition, events have been getting a bit of my attention.  They need more work and testing still.

So it has been fairly quiet around here, just us posting various awesome events.  As the developer, I've been mostly working on other things but this week I went crazy and decided to rewrite some of my older cruftier code.  As a result I introduced a couple of bugs, and also made myself aware of a few bugs that have been happening for a few months now.

So.... the site is faster, the code is cleaner, bugs have been fixed.  Thanks for you patience. 

Work over the last week has been mostly about fixes/tweaks.  However yesterday I got to do some serious feature coding on a long drive.  So I fixed messaging, and implemented blocklists.  So you can now block someone from seeing your profile/contacting you.  Obviously a pretty neccessary feature, but one which I have been lazy about.  Of course if you block somebody, that means that you don't get to see them anymore either.  I've got some additional features to go along with this to implement, but for now it basically works.

  We also now keep track of which articles you have viewed, mostly so that we can tell you when new articles are posted, but also so that we can give some statistics to article writers.

A few days work have gone into location dropdown auto-population and filtering.  I think everything is working well.  Certainly better than before.

Also I have altered the layout of the Location search results to correspond to how we do event search results so that the picture is marge.

There were also some infrstructure bugs fixed and some speed ups were actualized. 

Soon I will get back to tweaking ipad layouts.  Also I am working on the article code to improve blogging behaviour and facilitate the automation of content syndication from other sites. Stay tuned.

I'm going to start posting little notes here to let people know that there is stuff going on, and maybe to generate some discussion of features instead of me just operating in the dark. 

My work today consisted mostly of fixing a few layout glitches on ipads.  I'm really quite happy with the way the site looks and works on these devices.  There is room for improvement though. I am thinking of getting rid of the left and right padding to make more room for content, and shrinking the article category images.

Also I am thinking that paid members should have the option of removing the affiliate banners. Seems logical.