keeping the community informed...

It has been quite a month for DaniWeb, for many different reasons. Looking at the numbers, highlights include the fact that there are now in excess of 147,000 members of this thriving community, posting their way through the 300,000 post barrier across 61,000 threads in 100 forums. The blogs are blooming as well, not only do we now have 97 individual member blogs with nearly 1000 entries between them, but it was a DaniWeb blog posting that broke a major news story that went on to explode over the Internet and into the world of print and broadcast media around the world. More of that in a moment, but talking of blogs our blogging competition came to an end, and uncovered a truly great blogging talent in the winner.

While community members have been working hard to make all this happen, behind the scenes the Queen of DaniWeb, our very own Dani, has been working late into the night tweaking the all important code that drives those forums and blogs. You can see some of the results of her efforts in the new and improved home page that provides an at a glance overview of the entire system while remaining uncluttered and easy to read. The same is true of the newly overhauled blog pages: the home page with its ability to sort displayed postings by way of most recent, most commented upon and most popular amongst other things, through to a list of featured blogs and an easy to use tag cloud sidebar enabling quick ‘by subject’ navigation of postings; and individual posting pages themselves with both similar posts and related tags navigation browsing functionality.

DaniWeb: powered by Dani, driven by you. What a combination!

blog competition prizes awarded

Congratulations must go to joeprogrammer and his Right On - What IT really is blog which I can announce is the winner of our end of year blogging competition. Not only did joeprogrammer scoop the most views for his blog postings in December and January, with a total of 31,154 but he also wins the prize for the most trackbacks with 1614.

We have to say it is a well deserved double whammy, because the blog postings were consistently interesting, topical and well written. No wonder they attracted readers from with DaniWeb itself but also worldwide across the Internet. If you haven’t already read his postings, do yourself a favor and start now. We understand that joeprogrammer has no plans to stop now that he has caught the blogging bug. Why not join him yourself, it doesn’t take much of your time and as our new Featured Blogger will agree, the rewards can be quite astonishing…

blogger breaks global news story on DaniWeb

Here at DaniWeb we don’t only comment upon the technology news, we make it as well. In his Inside Edge – IT News, Analysis and Opinion blog Staff Writer and DaniWeb Admin, happygeek, published a story following some classic investigative journalism. He just so happened to have uncovered the very first case of a GPS Satnav device being infected with a virus at the factory, and infecting unwary end users. Worse yet, the device manufacturer had been aware of the problem for some weeks but had buried its heads in the sand rather than alert customers to the problem.

The article, TomTom admits Satnav device is infected with virus, was picked up by Slashdot and soon hit the front page. Within hours it had attracted the attention of major news agencies such as Reuters and CNet, as well as technology and motoring publications the world over. Not only did this DaniWeb story go on to attract in excess of 20,000 individual readers but it also forced TomTom to do the right thing and publish a security advisory on its website. Now that is the power of DaniWeb for you…

every month one member makes the DaniWeb hall of fame

This month we welcome roryt to the ‘Member of the Month’ section, and award him his ‘Featured Writer’ badge as a result of his excellent contributions to DaniWeb, in particular with regard to his Web Design Tutorials.

16 year old Rory joined DaniWeb back in October 2005 and has clocked up more than 1000 postings since. Most active in the Geek’s Lounge and Website Reviews forums, we interviewed Rory to find out a bit more about him.

What brought you to DaniWeb originally?

A friend from school informed me about DaniWeb, his username is Croft .L and he told me about it when we were on some PCs in our lunch break just searching forums on the web. He told me it was a large tech-based forum with really helpful members. What DaniWeb delivers is much more than that, it is a “Community” of people who are just there to help and I have to say that if you added up the IQ of DaniWeb members I am sure you would find it was far bigger than that of any other online community. So in my opinion if you are interested in tech or just need some tech and computer related help there is NO better place to be than DaniWeb.

What made you stay here?

You can probably see by my posting record, if you look, that I stayed in forums for a few months and then left until about August 06 when I came back and put a lot of effort into helping people and since then I have received a great amount of help and support myself. Since then, I have stayed because of the great feeling of friendship I have between many of the users and also the great help I receive. I also like to give help to other people because I think I can understand exactly what situation most of them are in. So if anyone reading this needs some help I hope I can persuade you to post on to DaniWeb your question and I promise you will get an answer that you can work with.

Name the best thing about DaniWeb, and one thing you would change if it were in your power?

The best things about DaniWeb are the members themselves especially the moderators and admin. Without them DaniWeb obviously wouldn’t exist. But that aside, I think it has got to be the fact that I have never had to wait more than 1 or 2 days to get an answer to my question and that I haven’t ever got an answer that hasn’t been interesting or exactly what I wanted.

If I had the power I would change the reputation system because I never seem to get any. I think people should be required to give a reputation to every single post in a thread that they have created. I think that would give you a much more accurate reputation.

What is your occupation?

I am currently a student, but outside of that I do some work for a web development company. My work consists of designing websites; building interfaces; and general graphics. I basically work with a small team of coders to produce complex web applications for small businesses. It doesn’t sound very exciting but I find it a bit more interesting than just designing a website because of the large concentration on usability.

What is your main interest as a developer, both professionally and personally?

My main interest is graphics because I find I can put the most amount of creativity into them. Like many web graphic designers I use PhotoShop and that is for a good reason: it is the industry standard, which is very important when you are sending images between yourself and others. I also use it because I just find it the easiest to use and because basically it has never kept me back from achieving what I want. However, I used to use a program called Paint Shop Pro which was good and is possibly even easier to use than Photoshop but it doesn’t produce the same quality graphics especially once they have been exported. But I would fully recommend this program for a person who just wants to give graphic design a try.

You run multiple websites of your own, which is your favorite and why?

My favorite website, that I own is PhotoShopthis which will soon be a fully working PhotoShop tutorial site. I hope it to be a very useful resource for PhotoShop users. I like this website the best because there will always be something new for me to put on there and I hope to give at a very friendly atmosphere much like DaniWeb. However, it is probably one of the hardest websites to run because it requires a lot of time to write tutorials and even thinking about what to write the tutorial about. But it is definitely the most enjoyable and hopefully it will only become more and more enjoyable.

How long have you been writing tutorials, and why do you do it?

I haven’t really been writing tutorials for very long but I actually think what helps me to create them is having followed so many myself. When I was learning the basics of Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro I used to follow a lot of tutorial to help me. In fact, I still follow tutorials if there is something I can work out how to do. I don’t think that if you follow tutorials you are necessarily no good at what you are doing because I find that now I almost know what a tutorial is going to tell me to do next. I hope that everyone can benefit from my tutorials not just beginners and not just those who already have a great deal of PhotoShop knowledge.

You are also am musician, what instruments do you play and for any band in particular?

I actually play a few very different instruments. I play the Euphonium which is my main instrument and on that I have received High Honors in my Grade 8 exam and am now going to go on to do my diploma. On the euphonium I play for a local youth brass band and also the Towcester Studio Band. I also play the trombone, on which I play in a local youth concert band. I also play the guitar and I have played for many different bands with friends on this instrument. I really enjoy music and everything that comes with it, and I hope to go on to study this at a music college in the future.

Rory, member of the month, thank you…

check out the Geek’s Lounge

Although it is tempting to think of DaniWeb as being the place where you come to get IT help when you need trusted advice from experienced professionals, and there’s no doubt we provide exactly that, it isn’t the whole DaniWeb. Indeed, if you ask a question, grab the solution and then disappear you are missing out on one of our greatest assets: the community. If you haven’t dipped a toe in the inviting waters of our Geek’s Lounge don’t hang around any longer. Jump right in and you will discover a whole new world of DaniWeb chat, oddball stories, fun links and blooming friendships. Pretty much anything goes in the lounge, as long as it doesn’t break any DaniWeb rules relating to decency, legality and the like.

To give you a flavor of the Geek’s Lounge, some of the hottest current threads include a number of interactive word games such as the Word Association Game thread with more than 140,000 views and nearly 5000 replies, the Computer Stupidities thread highlighting amusing tech support stories and another where members are reliving their Childhood Phobias. One thing is for sure, the threads are varied, always interesting, often great fun and the company exactly the same.

by joeprogrammer

Google has announced that they have put an end to Googlebombs - for the moment. Previoulsy a search for "failure" would bring up George Bush's White House page, but as you can see, they've fixed it.

Specifically Google bombs are created by linking to some unused phrase that brings up irrelevant results when searching for the bombed phrase. The articles linked go into this in more depth.

It's been quite some time that the George Bush bomb has been on Google. At least a few years. If they claim they are against this kind of bombing, then WHY didn't they remove it? Basically their reason was this:

"Pranks like this may be distracting to some, but they don't affect the overall quality of our search service, whose objectivity, as always, remains the core of our mission."

Ah, so it doesn't matter if their search engine insults the president. As long as it's a good engine, one or 2 insults don't matter... They also state here:

"The next natural question to ask is 'Why doesn't Google just edit these search results by hand?' To answer that, you need to know a little bit about how Google works. When we're faced with a bad search result or a relevance problem,"

So THAT explains it. Google thinks that if George Bush doesn't show up under the search term "failure", then it's irrelevant. It's great to see how apolitical Google is these days. When they finally get around to fixing it, all they really do is change their search algorithm that "helps detect Googlebombs in many different languages". Well, let me tell you something: a human is A LOT smarter than a computer, and no matter how efficient and fast it is, this is certainly not the end of Googlebombs.

So sit back and let Google show us their brand new anti-bombinb techniques (and likely some other insulting phrase). What a pity.

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