Brian S. Tucker

The DNS change went into effect a day late, but we had some bugs to work out. We will continue to see some issues and I hope you email me if a video looks bad or sounds wrong. We have a lot of new features add ed to the site and if you are reading this on my blog, you will notice that we now have several feeds we can post to to get our content out to more websites. Our new section of the site called "Level 5" is a premium content part of the site where I and others have made several videos that are unique and will be updating each month, so come back often and see what's new. The Level 5 section is complete, but several of the guide owners have not yet finished their guides in time to go live, so we go anyway despite not having the content we want to start with. Over a short period of time, there will be much more and I think you will see that we have some great content. We are changing our demographics to not only the IT professional, but also the home user and people new to technology. Some of the technologies we are developing, but not completed yet include Server 2008 Terminal Server, SQL 2008, Vista (which will include home user info and also how to migrate in a organization as an IT professional), SharePoint 2007 and some others to start. If you want to get involved, let me know and we can talk about what you may want to do.

Here are some of the changes to the site:

1. Level 5 Guides - A payment of $20 a month to watch the videos. If you can watch them all in under a month, cancel your subscription. However, each month new content will be posted, so you may want to consider keeping your subscription so you don't have to renew each time you see something you like. I know I always said that free is better than for pay, but with the hits and load of the site, we needed to make drastic changes. I hope that those of you who have been regulars to the site subscribe to at least one guide to help us replay the debt we have incurred to bring you this site. We have been 100% free for 3 years and it's just gotten to the point that we needed to do something to break even. I hope you can understand our position and support us as you can.

2. Everyone will be required to register on the site to see Blogcasts, post in the forums and even buy a subscription to the Level 5 section. Sorry for the inconvenience, but once you are registered, you will not have to login again if you do so from the computer you registered on. Please use your real email address.... I do send out emails here and there to all registered users and when I do it's generally important information about the site. We don't share or sell your email account. It's 100% private.

3. You will notice that all videos are much bigger now and have a default blue skin. We have about 10 skins you can choose from in you user profile. We chose the Glassy skin because you can make it full screen by clicking a button on the lower left side of the skin. Click ESC and you go back to the page.

4. All videos are 100% streaming and will not be able to be downloaded. Each video is encoded and streamed to you. If you are in a hotel like I am now or have a bad Internet connection, the video will skip, so be prepared for those of you who have poor Internet access.

5. When you register, there is no longer the option to build a blog. If you want a blog, you can go into your profile and add one there. This reduces the number of blank blogs we used to have.

6. You will notice the home page is redesigned into quadrants. Rather than just having new videos, we show new forum posts, blog posts, Level 5 posts and Blogcasts that are new. I love the new home page.

7. As you may have noticed, we have a lot of corporate sponsorship. We encourage you to see the products they have to offer and we have been very selective of who we accept as an advertiser.

There are other interesting changes we have made. Most of the site may look the same, but behind the scenes, it's very different and now that we are running our own server, it should be much faster. I hope you like the site and there may be some bugs in the first few weeks, but just let me know and we will work on them.

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