General: This morning, I woke up, I had a piece of toast....

Hello everybody and welcome to the new and improved Spode's Abode. Until recently, Spode's Abode hadn't been updated in quite a few years, still running on the original CMS I wrote (poorly) when I was 15. It got to the point where writing articles for SA meant losing out on the money I could be earning by writing for other publications. During 2003 we had a great deal with PC Extreme Magazine, writing content for them on the condition we could also publish them on SA, this brought us some of the best content we'd written to date. This was going well until the unfortunate demise of Live Publishing, taking with it PC Extreme. When this happened, money troubles hit both Pete Barnard and I, and we went our separate ways. Turning down investment deals for Spode's Abode (of course leaving me with a tiny percentage of ownership) I sped towards Custom PC Magazine, followed by Trusted Reviews.

January 2007, I left Trusted Reviews, with the intention of leaving Journalism behind me and starting thinkbikes.com - a mountain bike trials display team. Although this is going very well, it is not quite making enough money to support me. I also found out that having been in Tech. Journalism for as long as I have, that it's been difficult to leave entirely. I'm still invited to far too many launches and events, and I write the odd piece now and again for other publications. But my core interests have moved away from Hardware and full circled back to programming, Linux and software.

When the first 3D accelerators started coming out and Abit launched their Soft Menu, things were fresh and exciting. But now, with every motherboard packed with overclocking features, and graphics cards and processors doing nothing more than getting faster, the excitement has died down, leaving PCs as nothing more than expensive toasters. Maybe I'm just jaded, but it feels to me like there are much more exciting things happening in the Open Source community and in internet technologies.

Going from writing articles for a living to coding has left me with somewhat idle fingers, with opinions that just have to get out! And this, is why I have given Spode's Abode a revamp. The old site and forums have been archived off, and have instead been replaced by this rather swanky forum suite and blog. You can expect regular Blog posts from me, talking about anything that interests. I will however, be avoiding too much in the way of personal material - it won't read like a diary. But instead, a casual approach to technology news, and maybe a few how to pieces along the way.

For the new site, I chose to use "Vanilla" by Lussumo. Out of the box, this is a really basic forum, lacking frankly essential features. Everything else is provided by OS coded add-ons written using the Vanilla PHP Framework. Some of these are buggy as hell while others are at a state where they should probably be in the core package. 32 add-ons and some minor code tweaking later, and I'm very pleased with the result. Anyone who is interested in what add-ons I'm using can click the "installed add-ons" link to your left - assuming of course that you have registered for an account and are signed in.

A big thanks to KrazyIvan, Lolly, Beanz and Coyote for helping with the bug testing. There are still a couple of Internet Explorer 6.0 rendering issues to be ironed out - but everything seems to be working nicely in FireFox and Internet Explorer 7.0.

If you're used to the old forums, these feel quite different but once you get used to it, you'll find it makes a lot more sense. If things don't look quite right though, please do get in touch and let me know! We look forward to seeing some old faces on the forums, as well as some new ones.

<-- that should be a musical note...

I'm very impressed with your efforts Spode, I like this format. I hope the others will join us as soon as they realise this is here. Oh and just a quick note for Lolly

A toast to Spode and the new and improved Spode's Abode! (mine in non-alcoholic)

I do! I do! I do! Is it cherry cheesecake?

How did you know?

*hands out a slice*

Posted By: bill

How do we get back to the old forum? Will we continue using old threads or will they be moved over when some one comments?

At the top there is a tab/link named Archive. Click it and it will take you to the old forum.

OK I've had a while to use the new format and I like it. It does seem a little easier to use. Do you still have the member list going? I liked knowing a little bit about who I was talking to.

Haven't heard from coyote for a couple of days. Does anyone know how he's doing?