Ok, two things today. First is that I've actually finally almost finished designing the Slashdot T-Shirts. They are basically the logo you see next to this story, and will available soon. If you are definately going to be buying a shirt, I'd like you to email BEP so we can figure out how many of these buggers to print. We're open to suggestions (mugs, hats, stickers etc) so feel free to express interest in these sorts of items as well.

The second note is a bit trickier- it pertains to credit on articles on Slashdot. A lot of egos have been bruised, and I just want to explain things so nobody else gets angry. Hit the link below to read more.

Just going to take a minute here to throw a few notes out to everyone so I can stop getting a few of these FAQs in my mailbox. hit the link below to read several notes, some of which are quite important and some of which, well, really don't matter much in the grand scheme of things. I cover fonts, NS2/Opera, Flat Comments, Mugs, CDs, Books, Southpark and MST.

Allright I have a whole slew of announcements worth making related to the site, so I'm just going to get them out in a bundle. First off, the variable width thing is now working pretty well. Hopefulyl everybody likes it. Next, we've been having server problems- I'm not sure if its Mysql, Mod_perl, or one of my scripts, it just seems that occasionally the database connections slip up. Quite wierd. Hit the link below to read a bunch more notes.

After all the feedback I've been getting lately regarding the Slashdot rewrite, I decided to listen to the huge number of readers who were complaining that Slashdot was still just to narrow. Hopefully everyone will find this new 1280 template much more pleasing. Later today we should have the comments replaced with better code that eliminates clutter by never displaying more than one comment on screen at a time. Update Thanks to the hundreds of you who fell my april fools day joke. I should strip the addresses and post some of the irate email I got. Hope everyone likes this template a bit better.

Scott Miller (who obviously has to much spare time) has written 'SlashHOT' a java application that monitors Slashdot headlines, tracks them, and saves you the time of pressing reload only to find that nothing has changed. Grab it here. Please direct questions about the app to Scott.

We've squashed most of the bugs, but we have a few more to go, so bear with us. Please stop emailing about the page width. We're going to vote on it next week and that'll be the end of it. We'll have a link to view threads in a flat list like the old site as well. A few smaller features have yet to be implemented, and the comment code will have a few more refinements but we're almost done. Slashdot's load has dropped from 2.5-7.5 on a normal day to 0.25. mod_perl is cool.

In a somewhat related note, I'm currently toying with writing an editorial on Cookies, and analyzing why people hate them, and why people like them. If you have strong opinions on the subject (and I know you do!) please send them to me (and put 'cookies' in your subject somewhere.

Allright, the new site is up, and just about fully functional. Thanks to everyone who has been just wailing email on me all day (and all last night) with comments/bugs etc. Please follow the link below and read a few points and help me smooth everything out before monday when my spring break is over and I stop having spare time to fix bugs :)

Well we tried to put 64 megs of RAM in the Slashdot server this morning (hence the downtime) and some wierd EISA error appeared- we tried some stuff, and eventually went back to 64. Not so great, but we'll try again tomorrow morning when you guys aren't trying to get your fixes :) Also the rewrite is coming along well. I have a 75% complete version ready to go. Some of the new comment code needs some fixing, and a few minor HTML and graphics changes and we should be ready to go. It's designed for 800x600 now, and the vast majority of hits can be handled now without resorting to CGI so it should be much faster. Oh, and mod_perl is very cool. I'll hopefully have a beta version for everyone to test tomorrow night.

Well guys, we got number 2 million a scant couple months after our first million. Thanks to everyone who keeps visiting, especially the guys who send us cool new stories and post good comments to the discussions! Keep it up. The lucky winner was a Netscape 4.04 user under Linux 2.1.90 over at appliedtheory.com. Half a million hits a month... any potential advertisers paying attention?

I've Been real busy lately. I started the Slashdot rewrite this weekend, and have some rough code and some HTML running on my machine at home under mod_perl. Its going pretty painlessly. But I really wanted to a minute to comment about a few FAQs on Slashdot. Hit the link below and read them: several of them are important.

Now most of us are into nerdy toys, but something I think looks really interesting is the PC110. It's a tiny palmtop from IBM based on the 486sx. I've been trying to find one- new or used at a bargain since, well, I'm broke *grin*. If you have one and want to sell it, or have a company that wants a really good bargain on Slashdot advertising, email me and lets talk. This would be a great deal since hand held computers have tremendous geek appeal, and last I checked, so does Slashdot.

Wayne Roberts wrote in to tell us that Slashdot apparently has been banned over at Powerwave.com. Wayne says "Congratulations, slashdot has been blocked at powerwave.com by the microsoft loving NT admin. I guess the teardrop story did it :)". I'd like somebody to confirm this for me, but I do suggest that nobody have anything to do with any company that is afraid of a little old web site. It's nice to know that we're getting noticed!

Several people have suggested this, but I figured I'd give it a whirl today. I was browsing CDnow last night looking to buy some CDs and realized that I'm broke and need some new tunes. And I since Slashdot isn't exactly paying the bills, maybe it could at least provide me some new music. If you follow This Link to CDNow, and buy some stuff, I get a 5% store credit! I know you guys listen to a ton of music, and CDNow is a cool site, so if you appreciate slashdot, say thanks buy buying your next couple of CDs through that link. It won't buy me beer, but it'll give me something to listen to while I drink it!

Allright here's the deal guys, I am personally waging war against the 'www' prefix that gets added to web sites and I guess I forgot to mention it here. I think www is stupid- it's hard to say (9 times longer than 'web'). Originally it was nice because people see 'www' and they think web site, but now, if you see words.connected.with.dots on a commercial, you either know what that means, or you just don't need to know.

As part of the DNS switchover, I made 'www' stay on the old server. Just use 'Slashdot.org' to get here. I've been getting a lot of email from people who think the DNS is still foobar, but I've been really doing this on purpose. web.slashdot.org will also work, but I'd prefer just plain old slashdot. So all you webmasters out there join me, and alias your web sites as web and link them through that. Maybe someday we won't sound silly saying 'www' every 30 seconds when talking about the net to someone.

Update Couple of points. I think 'www' is implicit when talking about a web site. A commercial with a URL is advertising a web site, so they don't need the www. If you want a prefix, cool- use web. or w3. A lot of the discussion here is missing my point- we still need mail.foo.com and ftp.foo.com, but when 'talking' (in real life here guys- remember what it is like to talk to people outside of IRC :) it is dumb to pronounce www. It's just inefficient- 99% of the time it could be dropped. And I know the DNS is screwy still- I've sent dozens of emails to internic- it'll happen eventually.

Ok this is a wierd one:for those who don't know, I'm an Art Minor at Hope College. My next project in my Advanced Ceramics class is to make and sell 20 items. I intend to make either oversized coffe mugs or beer steins, but I need to sell them. They'll be probably $10 plus S&H for anyone in the US. I don't know about international orders. They won't have a slashdot logo or anything, but they will be hand made by me! Woohoo! So if you want to help me get a good grade, and would be willing to shell out $10 for a handmade ceramic mug, send me an email so I know how many to make. Only ask if you want one- I don't want to have a dozen leftover since they take quite awhile to make... and we all know how little spare time I have left these days.

Update:No logos. No Penguins. No Custom Requests. Sorry guys, these are art projects first and foremost. I started the first 8 today and they look pretty crazy though. If anyone wants a vase (mothers day is coming up!) let me know- a friend in the class (who is much better than me) is making vases so he can go to a ceramics convention over spring break. They'll probably cost more than the mugs, but they'll be really cool.

Well Slashdot has moved from Ariel (An Alpha/166) to Triton (A Dual P133). You probably should notice a speed gain, but there probably are some bugs that occured in shipping. The first server lasted through our first million hits, let's hope this one handles the next 10 million. Oh, and big thanks to My Roommate, Dave DeMaagd for letting us use this machine for free until we get some cash. Everyone send him a thank you note at demaagd@imagegroup.com right this second 'cuz without him, Slashdot probably wouldn't have lasted much longer...

I am happy to report that as a team, Slashdot has now moved into the top ten. All of you out there who haven't joined yet, the time is now! The revolution is imminent..rather...how about you join up with this? For those of you wondering how to join the team, some kindly people have included instructions. Many thanks to Erik Berry for his detailed instructions, and remember, when DES II is cracked (should be soon), all the clients will automatically switch back to RC5, so hopefully we can start cranking through there as well.

Well it had to happen sooner or later. At 8:00 EST Slashdot got it's 1 millionth hit. Here's the skinny-someone at ppp-206-170-2-11.sntc01.pacbell.net and was reading the comments on the Gnome/KDE Editorial I posted earlier today. But alas our boy (or girl, we could have a girl) was running IE3 under Windows NT! Ack! Will the offender stepforth and recieve his punishment of thirty lashes with an AOL 50 free hours floppy disk?

Apparently famous people read Slashdot too! We've had posts from many major corporations and many major colleges and universities, and now ddt (Dave Taylor, of Doom/Id fame, now of Golgotha/Abuse/Crack Dot fame) actually linked me in his .plan file! He linked the recent Apple and Rhapsody article with the comment "We are not supporting another Apple game unless Apple puts Rhapsody on gamer's desktops. That's my ultimatum." Wow! Makes me wonder which of my other hero's might be reading this site. Now if we can just get a few advertisers *grin*.

Well it had to happen sometime. I've finally worked most of the messy details for how we're going to keep Slashdot going, and better yet, to help it grow! Now as soon as we find a few cool sponsors, we're going to get us a nice fast new server. If you're interested in advertising here, mail me but remember, our standards are very high:We want cool, relevant ads, without tacky animation and excessive glitz to suck up our bandwidth. If you're interested, let me know.