Hi all. I just wanted to give you all a heads-up about two coming changes to Thurrott.com and our sister site, Petri.com. We’re hoping to implement these changes in the next day or so, but certainly by the end of the weekend.
The first is related to comments.
As you probably know, we currently have separate comments for Premium and non-Premium members. We did this for good reasons, but the result is a custom component that bogs down the site performance. And we’ve wanted to change this to a more traditional comments system to allow for more natural and fluid discussions for a while now.
So, going forward, we will be using a more standard commenting system. This will be properly nested and threaded, answering long-standing complaints. It will be much faster overall. And previous articles will display existing comments correctly commingled.
There is one bit of bad news, however: Premium badges will temporarily all be the same color, meaning that those who chose a custom color will lose that, at least for now. That will be fixed soon, however.
The second change is related to the mobile version of the websites.
Google recently announced a page experience update to its site ranking system, and the current versions of our websites rank poorly using this new system. As a result, we are moving to Google AMP (which is no longer an acronym but used to stand for Accelerated Mobile Page). The new mobile sites will have cleaner, faster new themes for the home pages and article pages. (And I think they look great, for whatever that’s worth.)
Thanks!
Paul