The OSNews blog once again brings us a fascinating article on the modern history of user interfaces.  This time it's an older essay about the user interface design for Windows 95.

However you feel about Windows 95, there's no denying that its user interface is probably one of the most iconic and well-known user interfaces ever designed and developed. Literally everyone knows it and has used it, and it singlehandedly defined what a personal computer's UI should work like. It's incredibly fascinating to read about the thought processes behind its development.

https://socket3.word...-95s-user-interface/

Nice 3 part article about the early days of personal computer game making..

The Faery Tale Adventure was a computer game that I created for the Amiga in 1987. It was moderately popular for it’s day, and was ported to a number of platforms, including MS-DOS and the Sega Genesis.  I decided to write this account because, much to my surprise, there is still interest in the game — I occasionally get fan email or inquiries as to whether there will ever be a sequel. And so I thought it might be interesting to tell the story of how the game came to be, and what happened afterwards.

https://medium.com/@...history-4fae0617a18d

Microsoft releases update to disable Intel's Spectre mitigations

Intel recommended that customers stop deploying the current microcode version on affected processors while they perform additional testing on the updated solution

http://www.osnews.co..._Spectre_mitigations

So now that we've moved the entire content of the DonationCoder website to a proper CMS, and moved servers, and are finishing up the move of the dcmembers accounts, perhaps it's time to think about the idea of adding some more useful, regular content to the site.

I'd like to get back to coding and doing some overdue updates for my apps, but I was thinking it might be nice if we could revive the old idea of DC "columnists" who would each write a weekly blog/article about some are of the tech/computer scene.

Ideally I'd like us to come up with 7 areas, one for each day of the week, and find a columnist willing to commit to writing a long-post/short-article each week, posting on a specific day, on their subject.  To be featured prominently on the website.

Here are some specialty areas I was thinking about: Security, Windows software, Open source software, Mobile apps, Technology, Kickstarter, Websites, Entertainment, Humor.  Those are just some topic area ideas off the top of my head.

Requirements: Someone dependable who is willing to put in some time every week without exception, and not miss a week.  We could team up people for a given day if they want to split the load.  A real interest in the subject.  We need to find the right person for each area, and you really have to be willing to make a year-long commitment to writing something interesting every week, with some images, etc.

Rewards: Official title, fame, love, and some small guaranteed funding.  [We will have to raise the money to pay for this.. I think what we'd do, if there is some interest in this idea, is have a fundraiser this year to pay for the year's hosting costs and some extra money to pay for this compensation.]

So the question is, can we find 7 people who are interested in embarking on this year-long experiment/job?

It turned out to be a huge amount of work to move over to a CMS system -- there was always one more thing to fix and do, and that seemed to go for months on end.  It's actually been something like 5 years since I said we were going to move to a new cms system.. And at least a year of seriously working on it.  The decision to move physical servers at the same time made some things easier, and some things harder, but it was an important step in getting us the cleanest, most easily maintainable setup.

It is such a relief to have moved to a setup that is easier to maintain and keep updated and secure.  I expect there will still be some hiccups as we get things sorted out -- and some redirects from old pages that we will have overlooked and need to add in the coming days.  But overall the move seems to have gone pretty well so far.

Most of the changes to the site you can't see -- they are behind the scenes in the way the back end of the site is handled.  Lots of things that were kludged together (submission forms, license key payment stuff) in the past have been rewritten and will hopefully make things simpler and less error prone.  The license key and donation system has been revamped and should be less confusing and less effort for everyone.

And I haven't said anything here about the new member server which is up and running and has some dc members working hard to polish up their pages.

I'll have a lot more to say about the new hosting company, the backend cms and the choices made -- why and where we go from here -- in the very near future.

One of the things that has really held back the current site in terms of writing new content and updating content on the website, was just how ridiculously hard it was to do (the pages were all hand-written static html pages, from 2005).  Now that we can actually update the website more easily I hope we can embark on a course of adding real content to the pages on a regular basis.  We can talk about such plans soon.

But most of all, everything we've put in place is in keeping with the basic strategy of creating something that can last indefinitely without major intervention and operating costs and overhead.  So I hope we will be able to keep on keeping on for the next decade.

Stay tuned for lots more info about the new server and cms setup in the weeks to come.  And thanks everyone for your patience!   And do please let us know about issues you find on the new site -- there are bound to be some.

-jesse (mouser)