This week, we are proud to finally launch our Thurrott Now micro-blog for Premium members, plus improved commenting and a few other new site features.
Yes, it’s been awhile since our last site update, but we wanted to wait until we got Thurrott Now up and running. And you may know, the origins of Thurrott Now date back to a September 2015 meeting in Fort Collins. At that time, our boss George asked me if there was anything that I felt was missing.
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My answer was that we needed to address those stories that were not big enough to justify an entire blog post. One of my goals for Thurrott.com is that we be useful, and not just noise like so many of our competitors. I’ve never wanted to inundate readers with nonsense. But I did want a way to mention things in passing that I felt people would be interested in.
The answer we came up with was a micro-blog, a way to just link to stories written elsewhere, accompanied by a bit of commentary. The issue was that creating a micro-blog on top of everything else we were doing—and then, later, everything we did for Thurrott Premium in 2016—would be time-consuming and would require a lot of technical work behind the scenes. And I wanted to start doing this immediately.
The result was Thurrott Daily—the posts here on Thurrott.com, not the newsletter; choosing the same name was my mistake—where I collect several such stories throughout a given day, link to the original source, and then comment on them. The Thurrott Daily posts were always meant to be a temporary thing, and would be discontinued when the micro-blog—since named Thurrott Now—was ready.
Well, it’s finally ready. Thurrott Now is designed as an ongoing stream of content, with each linked story being its own post where Brad and/I can add some commentary. We want to be respectful of the sites and people who create this content, so we will always link to the original source, as I’ve done in Thurrott Daily.
But that’s not all that’s new today. We’ve also completely re-written the comments system for the site, and while it looks similar to before, you will notice that it’s faster and has some nice animations.
Premium members should note, too, that Brad and I have now recorded over 90 episodes of the First Ring Daily podcast. I feel like the show is off to a great start, and we do a live show on Friday’s that everyone—yes, even non-Premium members—can watch. You can find all of the episodes here.
Finally, I’d like to note a new Thurrott Premium promotion for those who haven’t signed up yet. Now, when you buy a year’s subscription to Thurrott Premium, you will 1 month free. So the price is effectively $58 for the first year, instead of the normal $64. You can find out more here.
Thanks to everyone for reading, and if you find any bugs with the new features, or anything else on this site, please email [email protected] (and not me). I’m not passing the buck here: A real human being will get back to you and see the issue through to its fix/completion.
Brad asked that I mention that he “is the best person on Earth and I am lucky to know him.” I refuse to do so.
Thanks!
–Paul