Archive for the ‘site news’ Category

No, its’s not another new member, its just me wanting to say an official ‘welcome’ to Thorsten, (AKA The_Niles) and Ben (AKA Benz145) and to mention the other team members that are working with me at the moment.

Andre (Lyser) and Sascha, who joined us on the podcast last week, are going to be taking a look at UMPCPortal.de over the next few weeks to try and get that going for our German-speaking guests. Pdiddy is still working hard in the forums and Elliot (Arielviews007) is doing all sorts of stuff around the site. Of course, we shouldn’t forget the old-timer, Kornel who’s stock is rising right now!

I should also give a shout out to those who tip me, highlight my errors and notify me of spam and other site issues. You are just as much a part of the team as anyone else as are people like Ctitanic, Mikey and TSO; Consistent and valued forums members that have all posted over 500 items in the forum. Hat-tip to you guys and everyone else that gives feedback and keeps the site alive.

Have a great weekend everyone - Chippy.

There have been a lot of changes on UMPCPortal in the last few weeks. The migration to the Wordpress blog is the most visual of these but perhaps more important in the long run are the addition of new team members. You might have spotted that some of the recent news items have not been made by either Steve or Kornel. As newcomers let’s introduce ourselves.

(more…)

This feels like a breath of fresh air for me. I hope it feels the same for you. For the last 18 months I’ve been using a Xoops content management system for UMPCPortal news and to be honest, it’s been a pain in the backside. I’ve never been able to open comments up to the public, the management system was slow, the RSS feeds were always 30 minutes behind, the real time stats were almost non-existent, metaweblog posting support was limited, third party plugins always felt a little risky, trackback support was missing, SEO optimisation was poor and the design was always very difficult to modify. Hopefully, all of that changes from today (although I have left some patience in reserve for the probably teething issues) as over the last 24 hours I’ve installed wordpress.org, written a new template and imported the 2000+ posts from Origamiportal, UMPCPortal and Carrypad and finally, just a few minutes ago, switched over to the new system.

I hope you find the layout easier to use and the commenting system better as there is now support for unregistered users which should really open up the conversation nicely.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the old comments to work in the new database so I’ve abandoned them and left them on the old versions of the post which are all still live in the background. In fact the old system is still running in the background until I’m happy that everything is stable. I will try again to import the comments before I turn off the old system.

Other parts of the site remain the same. The forum is still there, the gallery and of course, the product database too but if you see something missing, please let me know. Please!