I'm writing this from Boulder, Colorado, which seems like a good place
to make this announcement — it was in this town that Carla Sinclair
and I launched bOING bOING as a print zine in 1988. During the past 19
years we've gone through many changes — from zine to webzine to
directory to blog. Today, Boing Boing is changing again, in three
exciting new ways: a redesign, the return of user comments, and a blog
about personal technology.
The new look comes from Jemma Hostetler of Studio Sans Nom. Her
redesign is cleaner, easier-to-read, and built to incorporate
additional new features that we'll be adding to Boing Boing in the
near future. The redesigned logo and new character mascots were
created by the fun-loving folks at eBoy, a collective of awesomely
talented pixel-pushing artists from Germany and New York.
We're also happy to be reintroducing comments to Boing Boing, a
feature we reluctantly dropped a couple of years ago. At that time, we
lacked the resources to manage the comments, and felt that a lousy
comment system was worse than no system at all, so we pulled the plug.
We've never felt good about it, though, because our readers' comments
added a great deal of value to the blog. To correct this, we hired a
terrific community manager to oversee the conversations: Teresa
Nielsen Hayden. At her own blog, Making Light, Teresa has proven
herself to be a wonderfully wise and talented tender of online
conversations. Teresa worked closely with our designers to develop a
commenting system that supports the Boing Boing community while
preventing noise from drowning out the signal. "We want this new
community system to make Boing Boing even more fun and informative,"
says Teresa. Under her supervision, we're sure it will be.
Our third major change is the launch of a brand new blog:
Gadgets.boingboing.net. While Boing Boing has always covered personal
technology, the four of us (Cory, David, Xeni, and I) believed a
critical, intelligent, optimistic, and selective blog about personal
technology and consumer electronics would be a fine addition to Boing
Boing. But who could we trust to oversee a tech blog that the four of
us would want to read? Actually, it wasn't hard to find that person.
We went straight to Joel Johnson, a former Gizmodo editor and founder
of Dethroner. Joel is smart, funny, knowledgeable, and curious about
technology. He was our first, and unanimous, choice to run
Gadgets.boingboing.net. And we're grateful he agreed to come on board.
We'd like to thank the happy mutants who helped make this major
relaunch possible. These folks went under the hood and untangled the
mess that Boing Boing's code had snarled into, and created an elegant, powerful system that positively
shines. Federated Media's Jonathan Schreiber and Ivan Kanevski did an amazing job of
dealing with the technical aspects of the redesign. Our beloved system
administrator Ken Snider worked his magic on the server side and made
sure all changes to the site wouldn't impact the speed of page reloads or clobber us with high bandwidth costs. David Jacobs at Apperceptive upgraded Boing Boing to the newest
edition of Movable Type, and designed and implemented the new comment system
to Teresa's specs.
Special thanks go out to the gang at Federated Media: John Battelle,
Chas Edwards, Josh Matison and everyone else that
contributed a significant amount of time and hi-octane mental effort
on making this relaunch a success. We're grateful to all of you for
everything you've done. Extra special thanks to FM's Jason Weisberger for
endless advice, encouragement, and, well, adult supervision.
Thank you!
We hope you enjoy the new Boing Boing. Let us know what you think by
clicking on the "discuss" link and adding your thoughts.
