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 need the year 2024 to go by without releasing at least one more update to the site. So here’s a quick rundown of some of the recent tweaks we’ve made. These are in addition to the adjustments beyond, such as all the paintings I’ve done on our YouTube channel, the reorganization of the site menu that I did quietly months ago, the addition of the full viewing notes to each and every Windows Weekly post, and the many other tweaks that followed. Scene updates that our amazing internet team has been doing for the past few months, such as adding live events. I’ll try to be more normal with site updates in 2024.
You can replace your username. This has been a long-standing request, but now you can move to the My Account page and replace your username. Keep in mind that WordPress has very express regulations for usernames that we can’t circumvent, so you can’t use spaces or some special characters. , and does not differentiate between uppercase and lowercase letters. But the form will save you from characters that break the rules.
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You can link your Thurrott. com account to a Google or Microsoft account. Over the past year, we’ve added the ability to sign in to Thurrott. com using a Google or Microsoft account. We didn’t advertise it too much because we knew that some existing users would need to replace their account to use Google or Microsoft, and we had no way to do that. But now we do, so you can link your accounts on the My Account page and then connect with Google or Microsoft.
After all, I’ve updated my bio. Some readers pointed out to me that my bio on the site was extraordinarily outdated, and it was, so I updated it. We’ll also be rolling out an update soon: when you read an article, the author’s bio in the more sensible right-hand corner is truncated without a “Read More” or similar link. But we’re going to update this to show only the full bio at any given time.
We also have some pending updates. The biggest one is that email notifications for mentions in the comment segment don’t work, but since all of this is dealt with through OpenWeb, our internet team can’t fix the problem. So I reached out to OpenWeb support to see what they can do about this issue.
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 post an article about a Pixel product, it will be classified as “Android,” which is a subcategory of Mobile. What we’re doing now is adding tags like “Google Pixel”, “Pixel 8 Pro”. “Pixel Feature Drop” or whatever in those posts. But ideally, you should have the Pixel Phone and Pixel Tablet subcategories under Mobile. More recently, the explosion of AI news has revealed our need for a high-level AI category and applicable subcategories (OpenAI, Microsoft Copilot, you name it. )
I asked the internet team if we can upload categories of articles in bulk with secure tags, and I think it will work. So I’m going to organize the back-end broadly, starting with some apparent high-level possible options, like the ones indexed 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. This will be available soon.
Thank you!
Paul Thurrott is an award-winning technology journalist and blogger with more than 25 years of industry experience and 30 books. He owns Thurrott. com and hosts third-generation podcasts: Windows Weekly with Leo Laporte and Richard Campbell, Hands-On Windows, and First Ring Daily with Brad Sams. He was previously a senior technology analyst at Windows IT Pro and author of SuperSite for Windows. You can reach Paul via email, Twitter, or Mastodon.
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