Behind Thurrott.com: December 2023 Site Updates

I mean to provide you with monthly reports detailing the improvements we make to Thurrott.com, but they often fall through the cracks. There are always reasons/excuses, but many times what happens is that certain issues or features prove to be hard if not impossible to fix or implement, and in waiting for that to be resolved, enough time goes by I end up moving on.

But I didn’t want 2023 to pass without posting at least one more site update. And so here is a quick rundown of some recent changes we made. These are in addition to earlier changes, like all the work I did on our YouTube channel, the site menu reorganization I silently made months ago, my addition of the full show notes to each Windows Weekly post, and the many other behind-the-scenes updates that our incredible web team made in recent months, like the addition of live events. I will try to be more regular with site updates in 2024.

You can change your username. This is a long-time request, but you can now visit the My Account page and change your username. Please note that WordPress has very specific rules for usernames that we can’t work around, so you can’t use spaces and certain special characters, and it doesn’t differentiate between capital and lowercase letters. But the form will prevent you from using anything characters that break the rules.

You can link your Thurrott.com account to a Google or Microsoft account. Sometime in the past year or so, we added the ability to sign into Thurrott.com using a Google or Microsoft account. We didn’t advertise this too heavily because we knew that some existing users would want to change their account to use Google or Microsoft, and we didn’t have a way to support that. But now we do, so you can link your accounts on the My Account page and then sign in with Google or Microsoft instead going forward.

I finally updated my bio. A few readers pointed to me that my bio on the site was woefully out-of-date, which it was, and so I got that updated. We’re going to implement a change related to this soon as well: When you read an article, the author’s bio in the top right is truncated without a “Read more” link or similar. But we’ll be updating that to just display the whole bio all the time.

We also have a few updates pending. The most important one is that email notifications for mentions in the comments section are broken, but because this is all handled by OpenWeb, our web team can’t fix it. So I have contacted OpenWeb support to see what they can do to fix that.

There are also some back-end changes coming that are related to how we organize the content we create. When we started Thurrott.com in 2015, I created a top-level list of WordPress Categories for articles—things like Cloud, Dev, Games, Hardware, Mobile, and so on—most of which have various sub-categories. As you might imagine, these categories were/are largely Microsoft-centric aside from a few top-level company name categories like Amazon, Apple, and Google. But this made categorizing certain articles difficult, and we’ve relied on another WordPress organizational taxonomy scheme called Tags for far too many things.

For example, if I am going to post about a Pixel product, it will be categorized as “Android,” which is a sub-category of Mobile. What we do now is just add tags like “Google Pixel,” “Pixel 8 Pro,” “Pixel Feature Drop,” or whatever to those posts. But ideally, we would have Pixel Phone and Pixel Tablet sub-categories under Mobile. More recently, the explosion of AI news has exposed our need for a top-level AI category and relevant sub-categories (OpenAI, Microsoft Copilot, whatever.)

I asked the web team if we can bulk-add categories to articles with certain tags, and I think that will work. So I will be organizing the back-end pretty broadly, starting with some high-level and obvious choices like those noted above.

But you’re wondering why this matters to you. After all, you don’t see these things.

Well, you actually do see them. Consider the post Google Touts Pixel Repairability Improvements that I put up earlier today.  Right above the article title, you will see a breadcrumb list of categories that in this case reads as “Blog / Mobile / Android / Post.” I’m not sure what the point of “Blog” is there (it takes you to the root of the site) but any other links you see that map to specific categories in our WordPress taxonomy. But at the bottom of the post, you will see a list of “Tagged with” items as well, which in this case is just one item, Google Pixel.

So we have different related links at the top and bottom of every article, which is stupid. More to the point, it’s not possible to easily mix and match categories and tags when creating or editing menu items in the top menu on the site. And so in cleaning up this issue, navigation will be clearer/more obvious to readers. And the menus can make more sense.

We’ll get there. And to the many other items that are still on our to-do list: We collect all the feedback we get from readers, organize it accordingly, and try to pick the highest-impact items to fix each month. And we’ll keep doing that. But in a future Behind Thurrott.com post, I’ll publish our top 20 or 25 items so you can see how we prioritized them, and this will give you all a chance to let us know which you think are the most important. A sort of site-wide New Year resolution of sorts, I guess.

But I have a newsletter update for Behind Thurrott.com to do next. That should be ready soon.

Thanks!