I'm sure you've seen that this web site is no longer being maintained, so what's next?

Honestly I haven't finished those plans yet, but at the moment it's slightly in favor of a technology/science blog of some sorts. No design yet, no definitive ideas yet, you can always leave ideas at my mail address (comments are disabled because of huge waves of spam).

I just want to thank you all for visiting this site when it was still running browser news :)

Been a year and ten months since the last blog post about the site itself. You may have noticed it already, but Avencius is in a maintenance mode. I still try to keep you posted about the latest releases and technologies, but it also means that no theme or feature work is being done.

First of all I would like to welcome all the spam sites that have been hammering on the servers, filling up the comments and increasing the user account database with numerous accounts (85 pages with 20 accounts per page in the last weeks). The Drupal spam module has been replaced by Mollom. Hopefully this free (and paid) service can help reduce this, while also helping Mollom to keep up their database on hostiles. Anonymous comments have been re-enabled now that the module is active, but I'll keep an eye out in case things turn nasty.

So what will the future bring for Avencius? Obviously the site has been slowing down for the last year(s) now, and several other sites have emerged who offer better and more intense coverage. Possible directions are: a generic technology web site (think Engadget, Gizmodo) with a taste of gaming (like Joystiq and Kotaku), and the occasional nerdy accent (much like Lifehacker and Slashdot).

Whether it will be based on Drupal, Wordpress, or custom made remains to be seen. But I just want to let you know I'm not letting this location become a post-apocalyptic era of the browser war =)

It's a bit late as probably most of you already seen stuff change as you visit this site, but hereby I'll formally let you know all the goods and bads that has changed in the last month or so for Avencius as a site.

First of all there is a new visual refresh, which is actually based upon the original theme of my personal blog, but altered to fit here. The theme simply called Avencius 2008.2 indicated that sporadically I may change some bits and pieces. The changes overall mean that the menu options at the top are gone, and only the name plus slogan appear. The blocks on the right moved to the left, while the labels changed from top to bottom. The background of the top of the site is slightly smaller, giving a more lighter appearance. And last but not least, all posts are now surrounded by a huge border. For those who don't like the changes, and/or are using an account, you can alter the theme back to the previous version if you wish. I hope you all like this slight new theme.

But looks aren't everything and to help a tiny bit in being more user and search engine friendly some internal workings have changed. If I'm not mistaken all nodes, blogs, and other internal links are now humanly readable. The numbered article links still work, but each node now has an alias that is actually a link made out of the node's title. In addition the front page and each article or blog post has meta keywords and descriptions added to them. Most of these are automatically generated, but new articles may get customized content.

As far as directions going, considering the last poll... for now Avencius will continue covering both web browsers, meaning Firefox and Opera, with some spicy sauce like Safari and Internet Explorer.

As time progresses the site matures further, so here's a status update on the development going on at Avencius. Some may know I have a different job now and daily made aware of different web browsers and web compatibility, thus some of the latest alterations to the site are a direct effect from that.

First of all you'll probably notice that all the links are red. From a usability perspective the black and blue was too close to each other color wise. So I do hope you know where to click now. Also in the sense of usability is the removal of several links, and mapping them directly to brand names. In addition all the artwork, except for the background, have been refreshed and are newly created images in the style of the previous ones with more Leopard (10.5) love.

Second of all, there are now Firefox and Opera links in the menu bar that will trigger filtering on a specific browser.

Hope you all like it, remember you can comment anonymously (as long as you don't trigger the automagic spam filter).

Every website that allows interaction suffers from it these days. It's like being forced to lock your door, chain your bike, etc. Even if it shouldn't be necessary, you'll have to as in all social communities there are those who want to do evil...

Anyway, my apologies for those who have been commenting and didn't see their comments appear on the various posts. Due to massive abuse of the anonymous posting abilities Drupal was set to queue all comments. I've disabled this feature and now everyone should see their posts again.

However, while I search for better spam protection solutions (as the current one isn't sufficient and on upgrade actually breaks), it might happen that some spam posts appear. I'll try to remove them as soon as possible, please do not be offended by them.

In addition the website has been upgraded to the latest release of the back-end.

Update: Spam filters are in place, registered users can help reporting possible spam posts, thanks in advance!

Update 2: It seems the spam has become worse than before and actually passes through the filter as it uses completely nonesense words and links. For now I'm tweaking more settings thus making it far more strict than before.

Time is a two sided thing, especially with web sites. It can make you more popular and mature, but it can also make your looks age. So here it is, the first iteration of the visual refresh!

If you haven't noticed anything and you're still seeing the old theme, go to your profile and change your default theme accordingly. The visual refresh is not complete yet, just as the previous theme it will be polished over time. At the moment you're seeing the initial stage which is ready for the public. The first priority right now is to clean up the php and css code.

Besides a visual refresh there have been other changes. Most importantly first: content. As I said before this web site stopped blogging on Opera, more specifically Opera news. Recent experiments have shown that blogs about Opera, and competitive browsers such as Firefox and Safari, have gained increasingly more hits as well as comments. That's a good thing!

The visual refresh also comes with some added value. Remember those draggable text fields that Safari supports? Well everyone who uses Opera or Firefox can now drag the text fields on Avencius as well, though only vertically. As this theme uses open source material, it can be acquired by request.

Although you may have been hoping for something totally new right now, that's not going to happen soon. Life changes, and so do ideas. For the time being the idea is to use my personal web site for the experimental topics, while this domain will be used for (biased?) blogs about web browsers, offering an independent view on every one of them. The idea of going for articles with depth instead of news articles is thanks to the free Dutch news paper called De Pers, which showed me another way of bringing people up to date and in for debate.

I hope you all like it, the visual refresh, as well as the hopefully richer content. As always, thanks for visiting my site!

Work is underway for the third release of the Avencius website which will sport more colors (and hopefully the return of the wolves) and will still feature blogs on Firefox and Opera (blogs not news). By returning to the roots of this website, which is being a blog, I hope to post less news and more articles which attracts more readers. Articles may vary from technical on web developing and technologies to previews and reviews of web browsers. In the shadows of the current website the main effort will be designing a new third theme (for Drupal), which will be done when it's ready =)

For now this website will continue covering Firefox and Opera on a lower profile, until the theme is done. I do hope, but I cannot promise right away, that slowly more blog posts are coming rather than news posts.

Update: Anonymous commenting is enabled again, but to prevent misuse by spam bots, users are required to enter an text image code before being able to use functionality.

While I will continue spending time on developing the new website, such as the design and the content, I've added all the blocks to the website to show my continued support for taking back the web with the help of non Internet Explorer web browser, such as Opera, but also the favorite Firefox. Of course Safari and Camino are also important, but both are far less interesting as they aren't crossplatform (and we must consider that Apple's share isn't big enough to change the web).

Take a look at the links for Opera and Firefox for recent stories and rumors on both ends; for those who simply want to download the latest releases, I promise you that I'll keep the trackers up to date =)

Talking to some people made me realize that there is some confusion on me, Avencius and Opera.

The extremely fast Q&A
No, there's nothing between me and Opera Software going on, this decision is purely my own. Did I stop using Opera? Nope, I'm still using it right now, while Safari may be default it doesn't mean I don't use Opera (especially since it has smarter pop-up blocking and tab management) and may use it even more again in the future (I spotted some Safari troubles). To support this even more, I love my mobile phone (W810i) and use Opera Mini daily to check my webmail, ha! For my personal blog (see the "Blog" link) I am investigating to switch from my home based WordPress installation to using the My Opera features (how can they give all this stuff for free?!). Why did I stop being an operator in #lounge and #opera? Well, I'm reducing time spend, so I only found it fair to not being a non-functional operator as I won't be online too often there, though I will peek around from time to time.

The future of Avencius
The upcoming website is not even designed yet, nor is the concept layed out. To make it even worse(?) I am going on vacation in April to Japan for three weeks, so I won't have much time. What I do know is that it's not simply a blog on Opera news, it will contain articles and will expand beyond my (remaining!) interest for Opera. So yeah, it may even have some hopefully interesting articles (not news posts) on Opera features and stuff. But also expect some oddities from time to time like job related software engineer articles (which may or may not refer to how Opera, Apple, Mozilla does it).

For now...
I will continue to refresh the Opera tracker with the latest build news, but for real Opera news I would like to refer you to OperaWatch and Planet Opera. I hope this all clears up a bit; feel free to ask any question you may have, or post some ideas ;) I did disable anonymous posting, because the spambots are freaking me out, however registering is fast and painless, I'd appreciate your efforts =)