Ask Paul: Questions About the New Site

I’ve spent a good part of the day today going through hundreds of emails and comments on the site: Thank you, everyone, for your support, encouragement and feedback. It’s been overwhelming, but we’ll use this information to improve the site—how it looks and works—and to prioritize content. I’ll write another post soon about my content plans—which will include a ton of reader feedback—but since we’re just getting started, I’d like to address some of the common questions I’m seeing.

So far a lot of the feedback is around the sharing toolbar thing (many hate it, or it overlaps the text, etc.), the ads on the site (which are often terrible and perhaps too numerous), comment counts not working and other similar issues. We’re racing to fix those. In fact, I think we’re already fixed them to a large degree. Others were very happy about certain enhancements over my previous site, including images you can actually see, Disqus-based commenting, and so.

But there were a few specific questions that may be of interest to a wider audience. These include…

Chris asks:

Will your old articles from the SuperSite be added to this site?  For example, when you reference an article that you posted a few months back in a new article, will it link to this site or the old one? Just curious.

Answer:

The articles on the SuperSite are owned by Penton, so they will stay there and not move forward to the new site.

Andre asks:

I’m trying to add the news website into my news source on MSN news (formerly BING NEWS) and it’s not working. I’m entering the address https://www.thurrott.com/feed is that correct?

Answer:

The URL is correct, but I can’t get that to work either. I’ll try to figure this out one.

UPDATE: Jason tells me that if you drop the “s” from https it works … and it does. I’ll write up a post about this.

Brian asks:

Why are you using HTTPS on your site?

Answer:

There are a number of reasons to move to HTTPS. First, Google is starting to use SSL/HTTPS as a ranking signal in their Google search algorithm, which means that HTTPS-based sites will rank higher over time because they are more trustworthy and secure. HTTPS also helps protect the people who visit the site and leave comments via Disqus. And it helps protect us against malicious electronic attacks. It’s just the right thing to do, especially for a site that is starting from scratch. (It’s a lot harder to convert an existing site, especially if it’s really built-out.)

There are probably more, and I’ll update this as needed and will be posting more soon. Hopefully I can get through the first wave of feedback today.

Thanks for reading!