Welcome to the new site!

After many months of hard work by Arktyp and Lullabot (and Shooby who fixed all the entries by hand) the new look TWiT.tv is up and running. Check out the video on the making of the design at Arktyp. And the incredibly talented Ted Serbinski has written about the Drupal side of the design on his blog. We're running on the fast, powerful, and flexible open source Drupal content management system. I chose Drupal to run the original TWiT site and I've always been happy with it. Considering the amount of traffic we've experienced in the first couple of days since our re-launch, I'm convinced Drupal was the perfect choice going forward. This site is running on the new Drupal 4.7. It's a significant update. Our design takes advantage of many new features in 4.7 like the CCK and the Views modules (although most of it is just stock Drupal). Thanks to Drupal the site will be able to grow as TWiT grows. In the next month or so I'll turn on the Drupal forums module and we'll be able to move our online discussion forums back onto the site. I've decided to keep Lullabot on to add additional features. We have lots of exciting plans. This new design is all about improving functionality for our listeners. The old design was essentially a vertical blog with old shows scrolling down and off as new shows were published. Jeff MacArthur at Arktyp was tasked with finding a way to make sense out of the disparate TWiT shows. His Information Architecture design is the core of the new site. He gave each show its own page and episode guide, so it's easier to find the shows you want. The simplified front page is designed to help new visitors understand what they're seeing. And thanks to Amber MacArthur for her brilliant suggestion of the Huh? button. I'm convinced that every site should have one of these for people who just can't figure out what's going on. Every audio program now has a built-in Flash player -- thanks to Mike Hogue and Ted Serbinski for getting that working at the last minute -- so you can listen to any show right away (we're planning to upgrade it soon with a player incorporating Innertoob functionality so you can annotate the podcast as you listen). We're also working with Podzinger to build in audio search, so you can find anything in any of our podcasts and jump right to that clip. I've commissioned all new album art based on the great character illustrations by Nitrozac and Snaggy of The Joy of Tech web comic. Graphic designer Lori LeBeau-Walsh is working on those and they should sppear soon. The new art will help unify the site graphically. And, of course, we've kept Dorothy Yamamoto's inspired little TWiT in a variety of guises including the nifty flash animation in the upper left corner by Arktyp's Tony Schibono. My news and blog postings will appear here, on the bottom half of the front page. New shows will appear first up top, then as other shows nudge them aside they'll scroll down the right column. The right column will always list the latest episode of all the TWiT.tv shows. To see a listing of all episodes of any particular show, click the show's name to the left. I hope you like the new design and I welcome your feedback and suggestions in the comments below. And I'd like to extend a special thanks to the TWiT donors whose financial support make this network and the site redesign possible. We've come an awfully long way on your generosity - you deserve the real credit.