First of all, from myself and the rest of the Programmer's Heaven team, Happy New Year!

Today we have rolled out a small change to the forum reply page. Before, we would always automatically quote the post you were replying to. This dates back to when the forums only allowed you to view a thread post by post, however for a while now it's been possible to view the entire thread on a single page. With the reply always being quoted by default, this often just led to the page becoming cluttered - if you were reading through the conversation, you'd end up finding parts of it repeated. The context that used to be provided by always quoting the reply has become less useful.

Therefore, to try and encourage not quoting the entire original message when it's not needed, we now don't quote it by default. There is, however, a button that you can press to have the original post put into the reply box quoted, just as before, if you want to reply to it part by part (which is sometimes the best and clearest way)...

If you have a Programmer's Heaven blog, you'll find that you now have a link on your blog start page to view statistics (note that you must be logged in). You can view the total number of hits that each of your blog posts have had, and then drill down to view statistics by the day for a particular blog post.

Note that we only started collecting the data this weekend, so any hits before then will not be included in the data. It should give you an idea of which of your blog posts are the more popular and still picking up search engine hits, however. Happy blogging, and feedback and feature requests welcome.

This morning the overnight train from Brest, a city in Belarus, rolled a few hours late into Bratislava. I jumped off to the platform, happy to be back home again. I have taken the last month away from hacking on PH, Perl 6 and my other smaller projects. Instead, I've been backpacking across Russia - from Vladivostok all the way overland to Moscow - and then spending a little time in Belarus. They're fascinating if sometimes difficult countries to spend time in, and I'll be writing about my trip in an e-book.

While I've been away, PH suffered some nasty SPAM attacks. I'm happy to see on returning that the latest forum posts box on the homepage is now free of them - I did manage to find a net connection and visit the site during the worst of the problems, and was horrified to see the mess the attackers had made of the site, and gave what input I could on the problems. The credit for resolving them goes to Brad, Nicolai and Kent, however. I'd like to thank everyone who stuck with the site during this time; what was meant to be a month of gentle development work while I was gone really didn't end up that way. Its sickening to think that some people make their money out of destroying what others are doing, and irritating that we have to spend time working against them, instead of working to improve the site...

First up, I'd like to thank everyone who has been providing feedback on the PH re-design. As lead developer, I'm trying to factor it all in to our development and prioritize fixes and improvements based on what people are asking for. We went through quite a bit of internal testing before unleashing the new PH for community testing a week prior to launch. Even so, various bugs have been spotted since we launched, both by the PH community and the team. Many are fixed, some are still in our bug tracker.

Some of the more visible things that have been improved in the week or so since the launch include:

• Restoring printer friendly mode in various articles where it had gone missing
• The submissions area now lists the status of your resources
• You can now edit the way that your submissions are tagged, to help make them more findable in the resource directory
• New resources now show up in "tag feeds", so get more promotion on tag start pages
• Tag pages now show synonyms for a tag, where we have them available...

Before now I've talked about our use of the Subversion version control system and Visual Studio.Net 2008. These are two of the most important tools we all use in our day-to-day operations. Today I am going to talk about another one that saves us a lot of time and potential mistakes: Final Builder.

Programmer's Heaven is a large site. To keep the code base modular, we break it up into many libraries. Some of these libraries provide primitives that we use all over the place. On top of this bottom "layer" are another set of modules that relate to specific features. For example, we have the wiki engine, the forum, the blog engine and so on. Finally, there is the web project for the site itself...