1998 - JoeUser.com is a "news aggregation" site that tries to summarize major tech news and events.
2000/2001 - JoeUser becomes exclusively the personal blog for Brad Wardell
September 9th 2003 - JoeUser is transformed into a blog community site where anyone can sign-up, post and participate.
Four years ago, JoeUser went live as a blogging community for folks tired of the isolation of traditional blog sites. The level of community interaction here, and the amount of promotion articles receive across the site is still something unrivaled in the blogging world. In those four years, not a whole lot has changed visually or functionally. We've made periodic tweaks and fixes here and there, even upgraded the underlying forum system that supports the site, but the site itself has pretty much remained the same.
Today, I am pleased to announce the impending arrival of JoeUser 2, a complete from-the-ground-up redesign of the site. Instead of trying to continually patch an aging system, the web development team was given the green light to tear the whole thing apart and build new. We've gone through the entire site, noting key functionality, and then went around to some of the most popular blog sites on the web looking for what features people liked the most. Based on that, we drafted a list of requirements and set about rebuilding JoeUser.
A preview of the new JoeUser front page.
JoeUser 2 has already been in development for over a month now. Remember when I asked for your #1 feature requests? We were in the planning stages and wanted to make sure we delivered at least a handful of new features that you all really wanted. I make a point of saying it's been in development because this isn't a promise of an "eventual" upgrade. It's something we're working on right now and have already made a lot of progress on. We're even planning on giving you a hands-on demo of the site closer to the end of the year so you can take it for a spin before we launch the "final" version.
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So, what is going to be improved?
- Completely New Account & Blog Management Tools
JoeUser will now have a set of tools to make managing your account information, and blog posts much easier. No more paging through hundreds of articles to find the one you want to edit
- Faster, More Stable Foundation
Moving to ASP.Net 2.0 and a redesigned database specifically built for speed and scalability.
- Redesigned Layout
Gone will be the days of a narrow sidebar that scrolls on forever. We've looked at every single page and asked how we could better present the information, how to organize and place it on the page so it makes sense and is easy to read.
- Improved Posting Tools
JoeUser2 has a completely new editor that will make posting and editing your work much easier.
- Designed for Future Expandability
JoeUser2 isn't going to be a fire-and-forget site. We have plans for future expansion of features to make the site even better. Those of us working on the site are really excited about what we can offer here over time.
- Fixes Fixes Fixes!
You know that Blacklist feature? The one that hasn't worked for over a year? That's going to work again. Since we're rewriting the site, we have the opportunity to make sure everything works as intended, so many of those super-annoying bugs you're currently dealing with. |
An early version of the JoeUser "Dashboard". Notice the stats breakdown on the right.
There are a ton of changes coming in the new version, a full list would just go on and on. In the coming weeks, I'll be posting articles walking you through the new features, showing off the new tools and design.
A new, easy to browse way to manage all of your posts. Edit or delete from the list, search all articles for specific content, sort by date and by category.
Like I said, we're really excited about the new site and can't wait to show it off to everyone here.