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We’d like to make it as easy as possible to give you precisely what you’re looking for from dzone. Some of you might want to track “java OR ruby BUT NOT games” and we’d like you to be able to grab a feed that gives you precisely what you want.

Building an interface to such a “FeedMaker” may not be easy, but the result would be cool. In essence you could assemble feeds that target your personal interests very specifically.

We’d like to know whether this is something you wold use, something you would value? Your comments will help us set the priority we give to this feature. Thanks!

Until now, dzone.com has lived on one of our servers that also hosts some other DeveloperZone/Javalobby services, but growth at dzone.com makes clear that it needs a home of its own.

We built a new server yesterday, and hopefully sometime today or this weekend we’ll be migrating dzone.com over to it. The new machine will run dzone.com and nothing else, and preliminary speed tests are indicating that it may perform much better than the dual-Xeon presently hosting the service.

We have adjusted DNS for www.dzone.com to have a very short TTL value in preparation for changing the IP address it resolves to. Still, you may notice a short period of hiccups while the DNS change propagates to other servers around the internet. It shouldn’t take more than a day or two for everything to settle down to normal after the changeover. TIA for you patience while it occurs.

BTW, we’d love to get some ping times to this new machine from around the world. Please post a comment if you would. The new machine’s address is 64.69.35.237 (cp8.javalobby.org) We’re also considering whether to move dzone.com from our Los Angeles data center to a facility located outside Washington, DC. If you want to post your ping times to 66.117.49.117 as well, then it might help us decide what to do. Thanks!

Single-page web aggregators are all the rage, but one of the very most popular and attractive is Thomas Marban’s popurls.com. Thomas took a simple concept and executed it with refreshingly elegant and practical style. In the short months since he launched it popurls.com has gained a very large following and has been imitated by dozens of similar sites. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Thomas should feel very flattered indeed!

It is a great pleasure to see that Thomas has added a feed from dzone.com to popurls (down near the bottom right.) We’re very excited to be keeping company there with some of the biggest and best established names in the business. There’s no doubt that the 100% developer focus of dzone will appeal to the above average audience of popurls, too. The cutting edge audience of popurls.com has a much higher percentage of developers and designers than a typical portal page.

We’re thrilled to be included on another great site, and we hope you’ll visit popurls.com yourself to see why. Thanks, Thomas!

We want to thank 3monkeys for some great suggestions on how to reorganize the top of the dzone.com pages to make key commands easier to find and to use. He sent in a mockup image of the way he wished it would look, and we liked his ideas a lot. Now it looks pretty much the way 3monkeys envisioned.

The key change is the inclusion of a tabbed menu in the green bar below the dzone logo. 3monkeys and others pointed out that the right-hand sidebar links to add new stories or get to the queue were not sufficiently obvious. Now the links for these are (hopefully) in the first place most people would look.

We have also shifted the search box to the far right, and we modified the login block a little to make it easier to get to your account preferences when you are logged in.

Wow, the feedback was clear. Many of you agreed that the time is right to make it harder for a link to get promoted to the front page of dzone.

Therefore, we have done precisely that!

Effective immediately, we have increased the minimum score and minimum votes required for promotion, and we have also shortened the time in which links can remain in the queue before being automatically buried. We hope this helps to improve the quality of promoted links (and not just bring things to a grinding halt!)

It is now more important than ever for you to participate in the community by visiting the queue and voting on upcoming stories. You might also like to try the cloud view of the queue, it is my personal favorite.

The number of links getting promoted to the front page has been rising steadily, and it is obvious that we must soon consider raising the score required to promote a link.

What is less clear is the question of how to raise the bar? Here are some possibilities:

1. Increase the number of votes required
2. Decrease the weight of clicks and comments
3. Decrease the time before a link is buried

Please let us know what you think about this issue. Is it better to raise the bar to limit the flow of links, or are you happy to have so many links flowing through dzone? We really need your insight here, so all feedback is encouraged. Thanks!

The overall activity at dzone.com has moved up a notch in the past few weeks, and it’s really all because of people like you helping to build this new community. We’re incredibly grateful for your support and excited for this opportunity to experiment in such exciting territory, hopefully creating something useful and driving innovation.

But regardless of increased traffic, what dzone.com needs MOST is for more people to regularly visit the queue of upcoming stories and cast votes on stories they favor.

» The cloud view makes the queue very easy to see!

The queue of upcoming stories is quite possibly the most crucial and sensitive variable in the complex equation that makes “social filtering” work. If more of you can make a point of visiting the queue once or twice a day and voting on upcoming stories, then we will be able to increase the score required for a story to reach the front page, and the overall quality of the promoted stories will rise.

It’s simple, if you visit and vote the queue more, then dzone will deliver results that are better filtered and more generally useful to the whole community.

One great way to help would be to subscribe to the RSS feed for the queue of upcoming stories. Then you’ll be among the first to see what’s new, and the votes you cast will have a lot of influence over what gets promoted.

Finally, setting the bar too high can cause problems, too. Don’t be too stingy and make that “vote” overly hard to win. It’s not a vote for a Nobel prize or academy award, it’s more like a nod, an acknowledgment that a story seems bona fide and has merit. If you consider a story to be above average, then it is probably good enough to consider giving it a vote. That’s my opinion, anyway, but your vote is yours, and I will be delighted for you to use it as you see fit. Thanks!

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As we talked about in the Javalobby newsletter this week, we have been working on providing a “cloud” view of the items in the queue at DZone.com. For those of you who aren’t familiar with a cloud view, it basically lets you quickly view ALL the items in our queue and tell which items are hotter than others (so you can go vote them to the frontpage).

Be sure to check it out at the cloud view and you can click the tag cloud to the right to view a cloud view of individual queues for each of the tags.

Is this view perfect? Of course not! We’re planning to add more information in a hover to each link so that you can see what the link is about and possibly even more. How do you think we should improve it?