Welcome to Sharpened.net Version 3.0!

August 17, 2002 — by Per Christensson

After months of designing and coding, the new Sharpened.net has finally gone live. Those of you regular visitors will notice the change in appearance right away. While the layout is similar to the previous version of Sharpened.net, the new design is more colorful and has just a little more of that 3-D feel everybody likes so much. Each major section of Sharpened.net also has a different background and texture, just to keep things interesting.

Another major change to the site is the navigation bar at the top of each page. The once-fancy rollover buttons have been replaced with new, cutting-edge hierarchical menus. The great thing about these menus is that you can navigate to every major page on the site by just selecting the link from the menu. Hopefully you'll find them as useful I as do. Also, the categories in the main menu have changed. The "Programmer's Corner" and "Best of the Web" pages have been consolidated into the new "Resources" section, which includes some other new pages as well. I encourage you to browse the links in the menu to see what new and exciting things Sharpened.net has to offer.

Underneath the search menu, there is a new link to Search Sharpened.net. This page will allow you to search the Glossary, the Help Center, the Jokes Archive, and even the Editor Updates. While the search is not what I would call "advanced" by any means, it should allow you to make more use of the information stored in the Sharpened.net database. For example, if you want to search the Glossary for all terms that include "Internet," you can just search for "Internet" and a list of terms containing that word will be displayed. A number of visitors asked for this option, so hopefully this will be helpful. The Search area will be updated in the future to include more advanced searching capabilities. (Hey, coding PHP isn't always on the top of my list of things to do in my spare time.)

Another major change to the site is that there are no more pop-up ads. I found these as annoying as anybody else, so I decided they had to go. Currently, there are also no banner ads on the site. This may change once I find a banner provider that doesn't place flashing hyper-color ads on the top of my page, but that may not be for awhile.

Finally, I have introduced a number of new ways to contact Sharpened.net. You can send a computer question directly from the Help Center or submit other questions or comments using the standard Contact Page. Each of these pages are now strictly PHP-based, which means Sharpened.net is now Perl-free!

While certain areas of the site are still in progress, I would appreciate any feedback you might have on the new site design. Please feel free to contact me with any comments or suggestions. It's visitor feedback that has kept Sharpened.net growing for the last three years, so please keep it up and let me know what you think. Thanks!