Dark Reading Switches To New App Platform; Please Pardon Our Dust

Dear Readers,

Over the past few days, Dark Reading has received lots of email from our regular followers, expressing concern about broken links, pages that didn't load properly (or took forever), and registration/subscribe/unsubscribe pages that didn't work.

We're sorry for the inconvenience that these issues may have caused. The good news is that most of these problems have been resolved -- and Dark Reading is now operating in a whole new application development environment.

As some of you noted from error messages, Dark Reading is now using PHP, the HTML-embedded scripting language. That's probably more than I should tell a readership full of white- and black-hatted security professionals, so I won't give anymore details. But for those of you who aren't planning to hack us, the move is a positive one.

As you probably know, the goal of PHP is to allow Web developers to write dynamically generated pages quickly. Using the new language, we hope to be able to deliver a new range of features and services on the site that we couldn't offer before. Again, I can't offer more details at this moment, but we think you'll like the new environment.

As part of the upgrade, you may also notice some subtle changes in the Dark Reading site. For example, it's now easier to make and read comments on our articles, and the discussions that arise from those comments will now be easier to follow. You may also notice that our search engine, which enables you to search all of the back articles and features in Dark Reading's archives, now operates more quickly and returns results in a more familiar Google format.

We hope these subtle changes -- and others to come -- will make the Dark Reading site more useful to you, our regular readers, and more navigable for those who may be new to the site. We're constantly looking for ways to improve what we do.

If you have feedback about the revamped site -- or if you find articles or features that don't work properly -- we hope you'll let us know. The emails we've received this week not only helped us to do quality assurance on our site development, but it also reminded us of how many readers we have who rely on us every day for security news and information.

As the construction signs often say, please pardon our dust -- we're building a site that we hope will be more functional and useful to you than ever. As always, if you have any feedback, please pass it along -- we're doing our best to make Dark Reading a destination that works for you.

--Tim Wilson Editor, Dark Reading