Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on January 14, 2008 by CyberNet.

We thought that today would be a good time to express our thanks to the machine that delivers CyberNet to readers around the world. Our Xeon-powered server runs Fedora Core 5, and it’s had an incredible uptime of over 6 months.  I’m sure it would be even higher than that right now, but I used to restart it once a week to help ensure that things would flow smoothly. Eventually I just gave up on that.

Thanks to hard working men, women, and monkeys like George (pictured above) we’ve been able to deliver CyberNet to readers just like you on a daily basis. So join me in showing some gratitude for the hard working machines that clog the tubes with useless information each and everyday!

I see it as impressive that a server can stay running for over 6 months without a single hiccup. For those of you keeping a scrapbook of CyberNet’s history, here’s a picture you can add to it:

Now on to bigger and better things…one year of uptime here we come!

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on July 02, 2007 by CyberNet.

About a week ago we gave you some insight as to what you can expect from the new CyberNet design that we’re preparing to launch. We’re almost completely finished with it, there’s just a few little details left. It’s been tested in Internet Explorer 6 & 7, Firefox 2 & 3 Alpha, Opera 9, and Safari 3 Beta and works beautifully. Our goal is to give our visitors an experience unlike any other blog out there, and we think that this new design will deliver on that.

Of course it’s not just a new design…we also have several new features that we are going to be bringing to the table. I don’t want to spill all of the details quite yet, but it is safe to say that you won’t be disappointed. Many of the new features that we implemented came from requests that our readers have made, and this is our way of saying “we hear ya!”

And to relieve some of the shock from the drastically different color scheme, we thought that we would provide you with this screenshot which was taken from our Beta design:

Hmmm, looks like most of the page got cut off in the screenshot…oops. 🙂

As it stands right now we will be taking CyberNet down on Thursday at 11PM Central Time to perform the upgrades. I would like to think that it would take less than 15 minutes to do, but there are several database modifications that I have to make including the conversion of all existing CyberMarks over to the new system. Yep, that’s right, a completely rewritten CyberMark system that you’re sure to love.

One thing that we would like to note is that we considered implementing a nested comment system, however, most of the feedback we received was in opposition to it. People thought that a nested system is too complicated and made it difficult to follow conversations, so we strayed away from the idea.

For more information on what to expect in the new design you can read this post.

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on August 09, 2009 by CyberNet.

I told you earlier in the week that a redesign was coming today, and I wasn’t lying. Hopefully when you see it for the first time you recognize how much we were pushing for simplicity. We moved common navigation-bar items like “about us” into the footer since a majority of users will never need them, and at the same time we made subscribing to our site via RSS, Twitter, and email much more prominent in the header area.

My goal was to give you a design that flows easily with your eyes, and minimizes distractions as much as possible. This is a tough thing to balance because I need to make things convenient, but at the same time weigh what features I think people will use. And then I have to try and present those features in a way that won’t annoy the people who don’t want to use them.

–The Homepage–

Let’s start by looking at the homepage. Here I tried to think about what I’d want on the homepage if I was a reader. Previously we had about 7 articles on our homepage most of which could be read in their entirety without ever clicking a link. If you’re reading a bunch of articles all at once that works out great, but it can take awhile to load if we’ve included some large images in our posts.

To get over this obstacle I tried to find a good median. What I came up with was displaying the latest article in all its glory right there for you to read, and then all subsequent articles are shortened up in a way that lets your eyes quickly skim past them looking for topics that interest you. Plus you should see that the page loads significantly faster since your browser is downloading a thumbnail that’s pulled from the article instead of the full resolution images. To help put the significance of this into perspective: the new homepage that has 10 articles is about 55% lighter in size than our old homepage displaying 7 articles.

–Article Pages–

When reading articles you may notice that the content area is significantly larger than what it previously was. This gives us an opportunity to include bigger screenshots in our articles, and will hopefully mean we have to thumbnail photos a lot less.

The main thing that I want to highlight, however, is the “share” button located at the bottom of each article (assuming you have JavaScript enabled). In there is where you’ll find options for bookmarking an article, viewing tags, and seeing a few related articles. If you’re a registered user (and are logged in) this is also where you can turn comment tracking on/off or CyberMark an article. Here’s a brief overview of those features for those of you unfamiliar with them:

• Comment Tracking – This will let you follow new comments on articles and even get email notifications when a new comment is posted. You can choose to follow new comments on all articles, only articles you comment on, or only articles you explicitly select.
• CyberMarks – This is our own internal bookmarking system. It lets you save your favorite articles where you can go back and sort or search through them to find what you’re looking for.

Both of these features have been completely rewritten, and perform much better than they did before.

–Commenting–

Our comment system has received a rather significant overhaul. We decided to move to a threaded comment system, which means you can reply to comments that other users leave. There’s a downfall to a system like this that I’m very much aware of. Some commenters like to take advantage of threaded comments by always replying to the first comment on the page, which ensures that their comment will show up above many others. I hate that, which is why I made sure I have the ability to “de-thread” comments that are unrelated the parent comment.

Threaded comments also posed another issue for people tracking new comments. If you get notified that there’s a new comment on an article how are you supposed to know which one is new? Sure you can go through them all looking at the dates/times, but when comments are threaded this becomes very difficult. That’s why we now “flag” all new comments so that you’re able to find them in a heartbeat.

We also managed to rewrite our custom AJAX comment system to work with the threaded comments. It was a little trickier than I had anticipated, but I feel like it works pretty well. After leaving a comment you’ll also notice that the page scrolls to where your comment was just posted on the page.

And then there is comment editing. We have migrated to a specialized WordPress plugin for editing comments (with a few custom hacks I through in), and editing comments should be much more reliable for our registered users now.

Note: For avatars we dropped support for MyBlogLog. Now you’ll either need to use Gravatar , or registered users can head to the account settings to provide a URL for an avatar you want to use.

–Searching–

I knew I had to do something about our search system because even I got frustrated trying to find an article with our search system. So now our search engine will sort results by relevance making it a lot faster at hunting down what you’re looking for.

We also tried to put some intelligence behind displaying the search box on the page you’re viewing. For example, if you’re viewing our home page or an article you’ll see the search box tucked away into the pull-down menu at the top of the page. If, however, you’re going through our archives we assume you’re looking for something specific and will therefore expand the search box to aid in your hunt. And we know what a pain it can be at times to work with those tiny search boxes, which is why we super-sized ours.

–And More–

• We’ve thrown a few new elements into the sidebar, including a better summary of unread comments and recent CyberMarks for users that are logged in. A little further down the sidebar you’ll also see some of our most popular articles (by traffic) in the last 7-days.  
• The account management pages are the same in terms of functionality, be I rewrote all of them to make them perform better
• In the footer we still have a nice list of our active All-Stars. These are registered users that actively participate in commenting and send us tips.

–Conclusion–

So I hope you enjoy the new site! For the last month I’ve spent 40-50 hours a week working on the redesign (in addition to the 40-50 hours at my full-time job), which is why article posting slowed down quite a bit. I’ve got a lot of comments to catch up on, and I have a feeling you’ll be seeing some more great stuff roll out of our site in the coming weeks.

Drop us your thoughts on the new design in the comments below.

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on March 31, 2008 by CyberNet.

After installing the new WordPress update on Sunday, for some reason it became more apparent how many posts have been published on CyberNet. We’re not sure if they changed the font, made it more bold, or what, but we realized we hit our 5,000 published posts milestone sometime last week and we missed it! As of writing this post, 5,030 articles have been published.  Counting back to 5,000, we found out that the lucky post was Ryan’s CyberNotes from last Wednesday (March 29th) titled Browser Performance Comparisons.

It’s hard to believe that we’ve posted 5,000 articles already. For those of you that are interested, here’s a quick break-down of how many posts each of us have done.

1. Ryan – 3,378
2. Ashley – 1,623
3. Pieter – 5
4. Chris – 4

Both Pieter and Chris are All-Stars and have guest authored a few posts for us which we’ve appreciated. Chris also happens to be the author of Learn Firefox which many of you are familiar with as a great place to go to learn about the Firefox web browser. And Speaking of All-Stars, we just wanted to thank all of you who are All-Stars and have contributed in big ways to CyberNet. At this point, the top five active All-Stars are as follows (view the complete list at the bottom of this page):

• CoryC – 644
• The Guru – 631
• netster007x – 564
• Pieter – 335
• Google – 284

While we’re thanking people, we might as well be sure to thank all of you who contribute to CyberNet whether it be through commenting, sending a tip, posting in the Forum, passing along our site to friends, correcting our spelling/grammar mistakes, or whatever the case may be. No matter which way you contribute, THANK YOU! 🙂

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com