19 Mar 09 Everyone loves statistics

Hey fellow noobs,

I am sure 99% of you won’t care about this, but I wanted to share some interesting statistics with the 1% that do. The following is a quick overview of daily noob.us visitors.

Age Group

I was actually pleasantly surprised by these results. I figured there would be a lot more in the 13-17 crowd but 87% of our users are 18+ which is pretty good. I was also thinking of doing a “Are you male or female?” poll but I decided against it as I had a pretty good idea how the results would turn out.

Country

Not surprised by these results but I am little intrigued by the number of Finnish users. Perhaps I should post more Conan videos?

Operating System

Again, not surprised as Windows is still the most dominant operating system in the world. I did have to look up what the hell #10 (Danger Hiptop) was. Turns out it’s the operating system for the T-Mobile Sidekicks. Good to know.

Browser

IE is still in the lead with 49% but Firefox is not too far behind with 40%. Nice to see Google Chrome surpass Opera despite its short lifespan to date. Personally, Firefox is my browser of choice at this time.

11 Mar 09 New color scheme

Hey fellow noobs,

As per your requests, I have changed the color scheme to a darker one. I have also made the logo linkable for easier navigation.

There is a new poll on the sidebar regarding this change. I’d appreciate if you all voted.

Thank you!

05 Mar 09 Say hello to noob v1.5!

Hey fellow noobs

First of all, I would like to reiterate how much I appreciate all of you who continue to support the website even with all the issues lately. I am especially thankful for all you regular visitors. The site would not be the same without you guys.

You may recall when I promised sometime last year that a new re-design of the site would be coming soon. Well, it sure took a while, but the new site is FINALLY here. It’s not quite the 2.0 release that I had hoped for (thus the version being 1.5) but the new site has tons of new features and bug fixes that was long overdue. Here are some off the top of my head:

• New design: I moved away from the dark / red color scheme and chose to go with a brighter color scheme instead. The thumbnails are also smaller to make room for more posts than the usual seven per page.
• New video player: This new version of the flash video player looks and functions a lot better. It has full screen mode, easier volume control and proper time gauge.
• Ratings shown on main page: By showing the ratings on the main page, a visitor can easily figure out what videos are worth watching or not. On the old version, most of the visitors were basing the quality of a post on the number of comments it received.
• Better pagination: Frankly, the old pagination sucked big time. There was no Previous or Next button and it was just a big array of page numbers laid out. The new pagination system is leaps and bounds better than the old one.
• Comment threading: You can now reply directly to comments and they will be displayed in a neat threaded format. It goes about 10 levels deep so make sure to try it out.
• Sexy content no longer shown on main page: This was one of the most requested features by our readers. Visitors were often deterred from sharing links to friends and family because of this type of content blatantly shown on the front page. But don’t worry guys. You can still access the “Sexy” category by clicking on the link above in the navigational bar.
• Share this!: Every post now has a Share This button by the title. Use this to share your favorite videos with friends via e-mail or by posting it on your favorite social network.
• New category - Pictures: Self explanatory.
• Tons of bug fixes: There’s too many to list them all but the big issues such as database errors, commenting problems, and videos not playing, etc have been (hopefully) resolved. I have also implemented a new caching system and stayed away from using Apache for my media server.

Version 2.0 will be coming soon (no seriously) and will incorporate a lot of the YouTube-like features such as user registration, user uploads, subscriptions, and video embedding to list a few.

With that said, hope you all enjoy the newly re-designed noob.us and if you happen to come across any posts or videos that are not working, please do let me know so I can fix it. After manually importing over 4800+ posts, we are bound to miss one.. or two.. or three.

Feel free to post your thoughts by leaving a comment here.

Thank you!

P.S. You will notice that the comments and ratings for the last 30 posts or so are missing. You are going to have to leave comments on those again