DirTeam CTO

As recently appointed Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of DirTeam I feel it's a good thing to inform the people committed to this website. Since a lot of our readers of our blogs also feel committed, this information is available to them as well. This is the first post in what I intend to be a regular update on the technical side of DirTeam. 

New features

New look and feel

In the last three months we've made some drastic changes to the way DirTeam looks. We've implemented a hideous skin that now covers most of the radiant beauty of our CommunityServer 2.1 installation.

The result is a website with a recognizable appearance.

I've spent many hours changing stuff in the CommunityServer web folder to change master files, style sheets and graphics to get it the way it is now. I'm aware of a few minor glitches in the skin and will try to correct these when time is available. As a registered user you can report glitches in the forum thread dedicated to the new skin.

Affiliation Section

Another new feature we introduced the last few weeks was the Affiliation section on the DirTeam Welcome page. This section allows us to share traffic with other websites dedicated and/or related to the Active Directory Community. While I write this post we have two affiliates:

Statistics

Blogger statistics

In the last few months DirTeam has featured blogs written by the following groups of contributors:

We see the diversity in blogging background results in content that is written from different perspectives, focusing on different areas and related to news from different parts of the world.

New bloggers

In the last period of time we also met with some new bloggers. Most notable is Natasha Mocke, who (encouraged by Carlos) wrote an interesting blogpost on practical best practices and some very enlightening posts on Hyper-V. (and Windows Server Virtualization as it was called back in those days) Check out her blog!

Traffic analysis

In the past three years traffic has been monitored using Google Analytics, but recently we started gathering traffic information using the raw header functionality of CommunityServer, which is the preferred method and will also generate more reliable traffic analysis. Below is a picture depicting the pageviews per day for DirTeam in the last three weeks:

Plans

We want to keep DirTeam an attractive website where everyone comes with joy to contribute to the Active Directory community and read great stuff. To further improve this experience we are planning to make a few changes in the next six months:

• Make the affiliation section available on the aggregation list page
• Attract two more more affiliation partners

On the longer term there are three main concepts that I will be working on:

• Recognizability
  To ensure people like to visit DirTeam I want to make the website recognizable. This not only means additional work will be done on the main pages and more affiliation deals will be made. I also have ideas to make the individual blogs more identifiable as DirTeam blogs. I want to make my fellow bloggers feel proud to blog on DirTeam!
   
• Durability
  In order to make DirTeam last for another few years I also need to generate income for the website. Right now we don't have any problems getting our website hosted, but as traffic increases this might change. 
   
• Easy
  Blogging can be hard work, which is why most blogs only last a few posts. DirTeam has had blogs that only lasted a few posts too. Right now we have a team of prolific bloggers, that sometimes need a little help. One of my goals is to provide this help to make blogging on DirTeam as easy as possible.

Concluding

I'm open to suggestions, so just leave them behind below.