Behind Thurrott.com: February 2024 Site Updates

It’s time for another monthly site update. This one includes some fixes we made, some fixes we didn’t make, and a new Premium feature tease.

The following fixes and additions were made to Thurrott.com this past month.

Images and hyperlinks in comments. Members who have had a comment approved can now post images and hyperlinks in comments. I resisted this one for a long time because of spam, but I configured it so that they will post immediately. Now, I see any comments with images and hyperlinks in my “Pending” moderation feed, which at least allows me some oversight just in case.

Affiliate disclaimer. With ad sales on a steady decline with no end in sight, we decided to finally create a Thurrott.com affiliate account at Amazon.com so that we could link to products as makes sense. This is a win-win: It doesn’t cost you anything if you use an affiliate link, and perhaps we can make back some of the money we’re losing. And don’t worry that Thurrott.com is going to turn into one of those sites that just posts about sales or highlights individual products as if it were some kind of public benefit and not a money grab. That’s not happening.

Display more of each Premium article. If you view a Premium article as a guest or non-Premium member, you can only see a bit of the text of the article at the top before bumping into an ad for Premium. But it occurred to us—by which I mean to my wife—that this is bad for SEO, and so we’re increasing the amount of text you can see in each Premium article. Frankly, I don’t think I’m done increasing that, but wherever we land, this will benefit all non-Premium readers. And if you’re a non-Premium member (i.e. not a guest), this will give you a better idea of whether to use one of your three monthly Premium tokens on a given article.

Username changes apply to forum posts now too. We added the ability to change your username back in December. But any changes you made were applied only to your name as it appears in comments, and not to your name as it appears in forum posts. So we fixed it: The name you choose displays correctly in both places now.

Some issues we’ve tried to fix in the past month remain, mocking me. I don’t usually discuss this sort of thing, but it occurred to me that some might find it interesting to know what types of issues we’ve tried to address but have given up on, and why.

For example, if you view an article like this one, you’ll see an author biography block on the top right next to the article text. But it’s not the full bio, and you have to click “View Articles” to see the full bio (along with all the articles written by that author). I asked about displaying the full bio right there, or perhaps having a way to expand it. But I was told that this change might have a negative impact on SEO, so we just made a small change so that the “…” trail off doesn’t appear if the bio is short enough to fit in that space. I know, big deal.

I’ve also returned repeatedly to a feature request for Premium users, one that dates back at least a few years: Is there a way to create a version of the RSS feed that would include the full body of each article, with images, so that Premium members could consume the site content that way? There is, but building that solution would be prohibitively expensive and would likely only benefit a handful of readers.

But that back and forth led to a major new Premium feature that we’ll be announcing soon. In fact, I spent much more money making that happen than would have been the case for the Premium RSS feed. But it will also benefit far more people and is important to our business, so it was the right decision. And while we would have landed on this new feature regardless, I feel like returning to the Premium RSS feed question is what made it happen now. So all’s well that ends well, I guess.

More on that new feature soon, promise.

I also have some ideas for updating the site header—I want some graphical links to our YouTube channel, my books, the Windows Intelligence newsletter, and more—and several other updates. But there’s only so much time and money, and we spent a bunch of both this past month on these changes, especially the Premium feature I teased. And I still have some open issues with OpenWeb too. This is the company that handles our comment moderation, and perhaps this is the right time and place to ask for some feedback (again), so I can collect the biggest complaints and concerns and see what they can do. Let me know.

More soon.