And We're Live: Welcome to the new Smartphone Thoughts

[Jason Dunn]

It took a lot of work - nearly a year off and on - but I'd like to welcome you to Smartphone Thoughts version 2.0. This new version is nicer looking, faster, has more space for content, has bigger ads (sorry, they're a necessary evil), and in general gives us the space and infrastructure to do some very cool things here in the coming years.<br /><br />It seems incredible that we haven't modified the Smartphone Thoughts template since we launched it, but despite minor modifications here and there it's largely remained the same since day one. I can't even begin to describe how complicated the whole process was, or how much work Fabrizio put into this process - taking all the phpBB data, injecting it into the vBulletin forums, merging two different username databases...the list goes on and on. Suffice it to say that it's been a lot of work, a lot of sweat, but that the results were worth it. The groundwork done on this process will allow us to move Pocket PC Thoughts and Digital Media Thoughts over much easier when the time comes (and that time will be soon).<br /><br />Looking at the site, I can already see a lot of things that are broken - give us about 48 hours before you start reporting errors. Most of the obvious ones we'll fix fast. I was hoping to show you all the completely kick-ass mobile template that Fabrizio designed, but, uh, it's broken - you'll see a SERVER ERROR page when you hit this site on your mobile device. I'm very sorry about that - I suspect it will be fixed sometime tomorrow. There are a smattering of other changes that need to be made (mostly in the forums), and there are some things that still aren't working fully (newsletter, etc.).<br /><br />Thanks for your patience as we polish things up - I think you'll enjoy the new digs. Your forum login is the same as it was over at Smartphone Thoughts - same username, same password. If for whatever reason the password doesn't work, use for Forgot Password function and it will be reset. Anything else weird going on? Post a comment and let me know.

[Jason Dunn]

Ok, somebody reply so I know our login system works. :D

[Janak Parekh]

Replied. Although I didn't actually just log in, my login was cached. :D

Hmm, I wonder if my post history was combined...

The new site is beautiful. Fabulous work Jason and Fabrizio!

Update: Login works great, I see my posts are combined. Woohoo! :)

--janak

[Rocco Augusto]

Everything looks AWESOME! You guys did a really good job on getting everything to look so clean and neat. I really dig the new design, very Zune Thoughts-esq ;)

[TopDog]

This looks really good guys!

There's a few small glitches in the design as I see it, but I guess it'll be tuned as we go.

Keep up the good work, Smartphones is taking off now :-)

[Jerry Raia]

Looking good from Los Angeles :)

[onlydarksets]

Bah, bring back the old forums! There is too much...functionality...here. And it's too "nice" looking. I'm afraid I'm going to break something.

Anticipating that I will be out-voted, let me just say, nice job!

[Jason Dunn]

Thanks for making me feel better guys. :D

Oh yeah, we've gotta replace these vBulletin emoticons as well...so much to do!

[Pony99CA]

I can't even begin to describe how complicated the whole process was, or how much work Fabrizio put into this process - taking all the phpBB data, injecting it into the vBulletin forums, merging two different username databases...the list goes on and on.
Out of curiosity, why the switch from phpBB to vBulletin. I know that vBulletin is a commercial product (and therefore possibly more responsive to bugs) and has more function than phpBB 2.x, but phpBB 3 is almost ready (they just announced Release Candidate 4).

Your forum login is the same as it was over at Smartphone Thoughts - same username, same password.
Am I still not at Smarthphone Thoughts? :-D

By the way, I know you said you'd catch the obvious bugs, but I thought I'd report some anyway just in case. What's obvious to one person may not be obvious to another.

First, when quoting a post, I'm seeing HTML BR tags instead of blank lines.

Second, I'm not seeing the "smiley panel". In fact, as you see above and at the end of this line, smilies don't seem to be working at all. I hope all of the smilies from Pocket PC Thoughts will eventually be included here. ;-)

Steve

[Rocco Augusto]

And it's too "nice" looking. I'm afraid I'm going to break something.

no, don't touch that! ;)

[jctune]

I remember having some discussion about this when you first laid out the plans to merge all the forums.

I'm one of the odd people that had a different user name for smartphonethoughts than for pocketpcthoughts, digitalmediathoughts, and thoughtsmedia. Cameron on the latter three, jctune on the former (I wasn't quick enough on smartphonethoughts).

So now when I log in under 'Cameron' I see both a post I made on thoughtsmedia and the one and only post the impostor 'Cameron' made on smartphonethoughts.

Any chance of getting my historic 'jctune' posts on smartphonethoughts re-named?

[cameron]

And here I am as 'Cameron' just to show that I can login using both names.

[Jason Dunn]

Worth noting: any threads you had set as "watched" under phpBB will not be watched under vBulletin. No way to avoid that, sorry - you can track them down again and re-flag them with the new system. On the plus side, I've found the watched threads system to be much more stable on vBulletin than on phpBB.

[Jason Dunn]

There's a few small glitches in the design as I see it, but I guess it'll be tuned as we go.

A week (or maybe two) from now I'll make a call for detailed feedback about bugs and things we might have missed - for now we have our hands full with what we've found now, so sit tight for just a bit. :)

[ajwalker]

Really nice eye candy.

I knew this was coming. Stepped out to lunch, reloaded the old page to see if I missed anything and wow, what a nice surprise.

Good Job!

[Macguy59]

I like it. The color scheme is pleasing to the eye.

[ajwalker]

Is the same upgrade coming to Pocket PC Thoughts?

Especially now in comparison, PPC Thoughts is a bit fuglier than before.

(No disrespect)

[Jason Dunn]

Is the same upgrade coming to Pocket PC Thoughts?

Absolutely - we have to discuss whether Pocket PC Thoughts or Digital Media Thoughts will come next, I suspect Pocket PC Thoughts, but it's definitely going to happen!

[Jason Dunn]

And it's too "nice" looking. I'm afraid I'm going to break something.

Hah. Add an avatar and you'll fit in better. :D

[Jason Dunn]

Out of curiosity, why the switch from phpBB to vBulletin. I know that vBulletin is a commercial product (and therefore possibly more responsive to bugs) and has more function than phpBB 2.x, but phpBB 3 is almost ready (they just announced Release Candidate 4).

I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I think they started talking about phpBB 3 in 2003. I kid you not (this comment says (http://photomatt.net/2007/04/18/delaying-22/) he's been waiting for four years, so I think I'm right). It's been on the drawing board for so long I can't even recall when they started talking about it. It was delayed forever, then the lead developer for it walked away, and it went on the backburner. The fact that they went from RC1 to RC4 in the past couple of months tells you they're only just gotten in a hurry to release it.

A couple of years ago we started getting hammered by spam bots specifically tweaked to violate phpBB - we didn't have a captcha in place because there wasn't one from phpBB. I emailed all sorts of phpBB team members, asking for a solution, even offering to pay someone to create a custom solution for us. Not one of them even responded. phpBB is one of the worst open source project I've had the misfortune of working with - I simply got sick of the lack of support, the lack of features or improvements, and the lack of timely security updates. I'm not an open source expert or a developer, I'm just a guy with some forums. I need a commercial product that has real support, real improvements, and real security updates.

I looked at quite a few options and vBulletin seemed to be the best - but interestingly enough, they couldn't provide me with a single white paper showing me that vBulletin was really faster than phpBB...their sales guys just told me it was. So vBulletin didn't impress me much either, it was just the least of all evils. There are some VERY big sites using vBulletin, so that tells me it must scale pretty well with decent hardware. The same can not be said of phpBB in my experience.

First, when quoting a post, I'm seeing HTML BR tags instead of blank lines...Second, I'm not seeing the "smiley panel".

I'm not seeing the BR tag issue, and I am seeing the smiley panel along with the smiles - so I'm thinking you might be having a browser cache issue. Clear your cache, or try another browser or PC and I bet it will work. We'll be changing the smilies though, fear not. ;)

[John Cody]

The new desktop site looks awesome! Great job guys.

I can't wait to see what the mobile version will look like :)

[Jason Dunn]

I can't wait to see what the mobile version will look like :)

In my completely biased opinion, it's simply awesome. Fabrizio took all of the feedback I gave him over years of people using the mobile site the way it was and he created something beautiful, functional, and sooooooo fast. I don't want to ruin the surprise, but let's just say it's incredibly bandwidth friendly.

[Prosper]

Ohhhhh Weeeeeeeee... that's really nice work guys... Like the look and the functionality :)

PS: Forums might need some new smileys :]

[Darius Wey]

Looks good. Nice to see the unified login system kicking in. :)

[david-ruffin]

i'm so used to the old design for the past few years but it's a welcome change.

i like it!

keep up the good work!

[John Cody]

Hey Jason,

Do you think you might eventually be able to get my SkweezeIt! post back, or should I repost it again?

http://forums.thoughtsmedia.com/showthread.php?t=22731

[jerboa]

Kudos to all - The new site looks great!

I had a few issues logging in but they may have been of my own doing. Got them resolved by resetting my password.

[Jason Dunn]

Do you think you might eventually be able to get my SkweezeIt! post back, or should I repost it again?

Yeah, we had a glitch where we couldn't import a couple of posts - Fabrizio says he'll fix that tomorrow AM. If for whatever reason he can't, we'll re-post it.

[John Cody]

Yeah, we had a glitch where we couldn't import a couple of posts - Fabrizio says he'll fix that tomorrow AM. If for whatever reason he can't, we'll re-post it.

Thanks buddy!

[bendigo]

Huh????

I've subscribed to RSS feeds for smartphone thougths and now I'm getting zune thoughts... what's gonme wrong....

[Jason Dunn]

I've subscribed to RSS feeds for smartphone thougths and now I'm getting zune thoughts... what's gonme wrong....

Haven't you heard? There's a Zune software update that let's you make phone calls, so it's now a smartphone.

I kid, I kid! :D

We've somehow gotten our XML feeds munged together, it's on the "to fix" list.

[Kris Kumar]

WooHoo! My first post on the new and improved site. :cool:

Kudos to Fabrizio for all the hard work he put in to get this forum up and running.

[AdamaDBrown]

Erm. Honestly, I have mixed feelings about the new look. It doesn't scale properly to high resolution displays--I've got about four or five inches of white space on my 1600 x 1200 screen. The old site readjusted perfectly. And yeah, I echo the idea that it's too pretty, and I feel like I'm going to break something. :)

[martin_ayton]

Woohoo! I finally get to be allowed to post here too, without registering separately. Helloooo, SmartphoneThoughts!!:D For an initial release, this is looking pretty good. Thank you.

Oh, and following up from an earlier post and Jason's response; I'm not seeing the BR tags either, and I am seeing the smilies panel (yuck!), so it's working for me.

Feature request: I often follow the links at the top of the page from PPCT to SMT and DMT - I guess I'd go to ZT as well if the links were there. I didn't mention it before because I assumed that it wasn't worth your changing the soon-to-be-discontinued phpBB template. However, the links aren't on the whizzy new VBulletin template either...

Martin.

[martin_ayton]

Feature request: I often follow the links at the top of the page from PPCT to SMT and DMT - I guess I'd go to ZT as well if the links were there. I didn't mention it before because I assumed that it wasn't worth your changing the soon-to-be-discontinued phpBB template. However, the links aren't on the whizzy new VBulletin template either...

Well, the link is there now. Thanks :)

Except it links to http://www.zunehoughts.com (no leading 't' in 'thoughts') so it doesn't work. I'm sorry to be the bearer of a bug report.

[Jon Westfall]

Great to see the new template online! Hope that the transitions at DMT and PPCT are much smoother :) Although I think we can all stomach a few days of bugs to get everything working right.

Jon.

[qyv42]

I really like the new mobile template, but I can't seem to find a way to go to the next page of a thread with multiple pages (such as this one).

(hoping the fix will be at both the top and bottom of the page since I often revisit threads on my device several times during a given day and would prefer not to have to scroll to the bottom of a page that I've already read. : )

[Pete Paxton]

Yep, looks great. Very professional looking but friendly at the same time. Good job!

[lsainsbury]

Sorry - it looks nice and all - but there's way too many ads on the homepage. It looks cluttered and the ads take about 60% of the homepage...

[onlydarksets]

Sorry - it looks nice and all - but there's way too many ads on the homepage. It looks cluttered and the ads take about 60% of the homepage...

I see only two small ads on the homepage, and then a small sponsored links box if you scroll down? The rest are links to other stories.

That said, I don't really need 30 links to Thoughts Media News and Articles. The few at the top are enough, IMHO.

[karinatwork]

Hurray! This looks awesome! I know it's not nice to talk badly about the "discontinued", but to tell you the truth... the startup orange on the old site gave me major headaches.. ;)

[Jason Dunn]

Hurray! This looks awesome! I know it's not nice to talk badly about the "discontinued", but to tell you the truth... the startup orange on the old site gave me major headaches.. ;)

Glad you like the new design - Fabrizio did a good job with this new one, didn't he? It still has the same basic orange theme, but it's less jarring on the eyes. I'll miss the look a bit myself. :D

[yslee]

Congrats on the move! Going to post a little feedback.

I sorta miss a "View New Posts" function from the main page. Not a big deal, but would be nice to have.

Another thing is that the forum layout looks a little weird. I'm used to seeing all boards visible to me. Right now having to click on a sub-forum to view the boards under it is a little annoying.

Also I think some threads got migrated to the wrong forum? The Software board in the Front-Page Archives has zero posts. I'm pretty sure that's not how it works. :P

[encece]

Site looks great BUT boy do those ads look HUGE! When I log in on a 1440 x 900 rez screen...all I see is the logo, the two HUGE ADS and part of the first story.

Also I needed to log in using my ThoughtMedia password. (I didnt read everything...is it supposed to be that way?)

[encece]

Also....more constructive criticism....

...on the same res screen the site looks a bit too narrow, not utilizing the whole screen. I understand and not saying it looks TERRIBLE...but I kindof liked the old dynamically sized way better (at least I think I was)

[onlydarksets]

I see only two small ads on the homepage, and then a small sponsored links box if you scroll down? The rest are links to other stories.

That said, I don't really need 30 links to Thoughts Media News and Articles. The few at the top are enough, IMHO.

OK, the other ads showed up today. I agree - the banner ad at the top eats up all of the real estate on my widescreen laptop.

[Jason Dunn]

Erm. Honestly, I have mixed feelings about the new look. It doesn't scale properly to high resolution displays--I've got about four or five inches of white space on my 1600 x 1200 screen. The old site readjusted perfectly.

Ah, you're one of those full-screen browser types then? I'm the opposite - I'm on a 24" wide-screen monitor at 1920 x 1200 resolution, and I have my browser filling the entire vertical and about half the horizontal (1000 pixels or so). When I'm on a lower resolution screen, like my laptop which is 1280 x 800, I'll browse full screen. Basically I stay around 1000 to 1200 pixels in browser width because that's what the vast majority of Web pages are designed for.

I've discussed this issue a dozen times over the years, and there's absolutely no way to please everyone - there seems to be about a 50/50 split of people that are full-screen browsers vs. partial screen browsers, though as you move into higher monitor resolutions the number of partial screen browsers goes up. I'm surprised you're browsing full-screen on 1600 x 1200 - most sites aren't going to give you 1600 pixels of content width-wise.

At any rate, all I can say is "sorry you don't like it" - fixed with is the only way to control the user experience and make sure it's great for everyone, regardless of browser width. Only fairly simple layouts scale well to full-browser widths - take a look at the top sites out there and most of them will be fixed width (YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, etc.). We experimented with adding a dynamic fourth column that would pop into existence when someone was browsing wider than 1100 pixels, but it was highly problematic because IE and Firefox treated it differently. IE would load it instantly, but Firefox would require a page load.

[Jason Dunn]

Site looks great BUT boy do those ads look HUGE! When I log in on a 1440 x 900 rez screen...all I see is the logo, the two HUGE ADS and part of the first story.

Sorry you feel that way. Ads are a necessary evil because this is what I do for a living - I have no other job other than Thoughts Media. The ad sizes are identical to Engadget (http://www.engadget.com/), and the placement is almost identical.

Also I needed to log in using my ThoughtMedia password. (I didnt read everything...is it supposed to be that way?)

No, you should have been able to log in with your Smartphone Thoughts username and password. I checked and there's only one "encece" in our database.

[Jason Dunn]

I sorta miss a "View New Posts" function from the main page. Not a big deal, but would be nice to have.

Agreed. Let me add that to the list...

Another thing is that the forum layout looks a little weird. I'm used to seeing all boards visible to me. Right now having to click on a sub-forum to view the boards under it is a little annoying.

Yeah, 100% my fault - I haven't finished migrating and moving around the forums. Will try to have that done before the end of the week.

[Jason Dunn]

...the banner ad at the top eats up all of the real estate on my widescreen laptop.

Come now, let's not exaggerate - it eats up 90 pixels of height. :D

[brianchris]

Sorry in advance if this was already discussed in this rather long thread, but I searched this thread only for "RSS" and "feeds" and found nothing, so here goes:

I subscribe to most of the Thoughts Media sights RSS feeds via Outlook 2007. Now, when Outlook 2007 was first released, its RSS functionality was pretty bad......duplicate RSS posts occured ALL the time. Sometime between then and now however, Outlook 2007 became much beter regarding duplicate RSS posts.....I suspect a Microsoft Update was automatically applied to address that issue.

Anyway, everything was fine UNTIL Smartphone Thoughts got its recent (and great) facelift.....now, I'm experiencing duplicate RSS posts again, BUT *only* in the Smartphone Thoughts RSS feed (not Pocket PC Thoughts, Digital Media Thoughts, etc.)

I am a newbie to RSS, so there's probably something simple I'm missing, so don't hesitate to slap me around a bit. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[Kacey Green]

This is much nicer, good work!
I the RSS link came up with an invalid address: http://www.zunethoughts.comhttp//www.smartphonethoughts.com/news/show/22750/and-we-re-live-welcome-to-the-new-smartphone-thoughts.html

[Jason Dunn]

Anyway, everything was fine UNTIL Smartphone Thoughts got its recent (and great) facelift.....now, I'm experiencing duplicate RSS posts again, BUT *only* in the Smartphone Thoughts RSS feed (not Pocket PC Thoughts, Digital Media Thoughts, etc.)

Hmm. I no longer use Outlook 2007 for my RSS feeds, I use a product called FeedDemon (http://www.newsgator.com/Individuals/FeedDemon/Default.aspx), and I've been watching our feed for a while now and I haven't seen any duplicate feed items - the one exception being when we publish something, my feed reader downloads the feed item, then we change the item and it's picked up as being updated.

I don't know what to suggest other than to delete the feed from Outlook 2007 then re-add it in again...? Sorry for your trouble. :(

[Jason Dunn]

I the RSS link came up with an invalid address: http://www.zunethoughts.comhttp//www.smartphonethoughts.com/news/show/22750/and-we-re-live-welcome-to-the-new-smartphone-thoughts.html

Where are you seeing that RSS feed or link? I need specifics to solve the problem. :)