Pardon the dust, we’ve gone ahead and made some changes to our site and your experience.  For one thing, we’ve moved off our dedicated server to WebHost4Life, definitely a cost saving move, but we haven’t sacrificed much if anything in terms of computing power.  We tried to clean up the look a bit, too, making the fonts a bit bigger and moving our main story up where it can get a little more attention.

Perhaps the biggest change is that we’re giving Disqus a try.  If you don’t know, Disqus is a managed comment system that allows you to manage your comments across the web, and for us to manage users and comments more effectively here.  You can post a comment as a guest, log in with a Disqus account, or even log in with your Facebook or your Twitter accounts (and no, they don’t have Windows Live ID integration…yet.  We’re working on them, believe it!).

After fighting off spam attacks most of the summer, we’re moving away from managing user accounts here on LiveSide.  We’re happy to let Disqus handle that for us, while we concentrate on the fun stuff.  We haven’t lost or deleted any user accounts, although we’re turning off the ability to comment via Community Server.  All of your accounts are still available (you can sign in via the link in the footer), and all of your previous comments are still here.  Let us know if you need any help with your accounts, just email us at feedback *at* LiveSide *dot* net

We also added some Twitter widgets that allow you to see the latest from a number of our favorite Twitter searches, in somewhat real time.

Making these changes allows us to get back to focusing on Microsoft, Windows Live, and online services, and we’re excited to be able to be back for year 5!