Stick around long enough in the tech sector and the "news" starts to look old: thin clients get fat, then slim down again. We do our processing on the server, then the desktop, then the server again. That doesn't mean progress is always for the better, except when it is.

Still have fond memories of a tech era other than present, even if you recognize time marches on? This poll is "approval voting" so select one or more, anything that makes you nostalgic. Obviously it was impossible to get all the choices on the list, so if we've forgotten anything, add it into the comments. Happy Monday, everybody.

Start here: http://pipedot.org/poll/17/tech-that-im-nostalgic-for

Good news everyone! A new (user-visible) feature! Story images!

Okay, so trying to find an acceptable 64x64 pixel icon for each story got old pretty fast. There never seemed to be enough of them and they didn't always fit the article correctly. But with today's news sites wanting lots of eye candy, most articles already have at least one relevant image of the story. So we'll just make a small thumbnail of that!

You can change the quality of the thumbnail using the "Story Image Style" in your settings page. Or you can opt to keep the icons or disable the images altogether. If you have a high resolution screen (e.g. Apple's Retina displays) with a pixel ratio greater than the traditional 1:1, you can select one of the "High Resolution" options to get a sharper image.

Ever revisit a popular story page and wish you could easily distinguish the new comments from the stuff you've already read? Well, now you can!

New comments are now shown in blue, while old comments are shown in gray. Simple enough, right?

Not everyone is a web developer; and those that aren't sometimes forget the raw HTML syntax used to format comments. For these poor saps (and perhaps for lazy web developers as well) Pipecode now includes an optional WYSIWYG editor.

To use the editor, simply make sure that both the "Enable Javascript" and the "WYSIWYG Editor" checkboxes are enabled on your settings page.

Good news everyone! I hacked away enough at the code base this weekend to make it mildly presentable. Weighing in at 814 kB, the download shouldn't stress your connection too much. :)

So, if you are interested in installing it yourself, go to http://pipecode.org/ for the installation instructions and the download tarball. The GitHub repository has also been updated.

As a promotion and a small thank you to the contributers, I am pleased to announce... a free USB drive sporting the Pipedot logo! Although this site is still pretty small, a dedicated few of you have really stepped up and helped submit stories, post comments, and moderate. If you have received an email from me about a drive, simply respond with your shipping info and I'll send you one!

The drive is a modern all metal design with a convenient ring handle. The capacity is four gigabytes and comes preformatted as FAT32 - but otherwise blank. The drive is bootable; and I've used one this week to load Ubuntu 14.04 on a few computers. With a 14.3 MB/s average read and 2.6 MB/s average write speed, it's not going to win any speed competitions, but it sure looks sexy.

How much do you trust popular websites to maintain your data and online privacy? In this week's poll you can rank them using the Borda Count voting method.

Instructions:

1. In the box next to each item, put your choice of rank. The site you trust the most earns a "1", the site you trust just a bit less gets a "2", a site you trust even less gets a "3", etc. So "1" is the site you find most trustworthy.
2. You don't have to rank all 8; you can just rank the ones you have an opinion about. But since there are only 8 choices, you can't input a number higher than that (ie, it's impossible to rank something 9th place in a contest with only 8 places).
3. Simply be careful not to duplicate numbers!
   Have fun!

[Post edited by zafiro17 2014-04-28 13:54 to clarify the instructions.]

Plenty of updates this week! Nearly every single source file and database table was modified this week to help further the distributed goal of the Pipecode project. More information on this will be given over the following weeks as more functionality gets merged to live.

• Comment Reply Notification - You now get an internal email notification sent to you when someone replies to one of your comments.
• UID to ZID - Usernames and Identification are now shown in an email style format (username@pipedot.org)
• Clickable Bare Links - Bare links will now automatically be wrapped with the correct HTML tags to make them clickable.
• Consistent Newlines - Posts with blockquote/ul/ol/li/pre HTML tags should now have better newline handling.
• Servers upgraded from Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to 14.04 LTS.

Updates for this week include:

• Added an internal mail system. Users can now privately message each other using familiar email style (username@pipedot.org) addresses.
• New captcha system based off of the textcaptcha.com service.
• You can now submit stories as an AC without logging in.
• You can now post comments as an AC without logging in.
• Raised the default moderation score to 1 for non-AC comments.
• You can no longer moderate your own comments.
• Hide and Expand thresholds can now be saved in your account settings page.
• Added icons to hopefully improve the visibility of certain functions (The syndication feed at the bottom of the page and the Reply button at the top of comment sections)

The logo contest had 528 entries from 127 different designers. There were so many interesting submissions, that I found it hard to pick just one!

The winning logo is now plastered at the top of this page, for all eternity. The website's design and CSS has also been tweaked a bit to reflect the new "lighter" look.