Digital Home Thoughts: Welcome to Digital Home Thoughts

After much work, stress, and wringing-of-hands, I'd like to officially unveil Digital Home Thoughts, the new home, and new name, of the site formerly known as Digital Media Thoughts. When I launched Digital Media Thoughts a few years ago, the name and focus of the site made sense to me at the time. In truth, a bit more research would have told me what I later discovered: the term "media" in the site was confusing. "Media" means one of three things to almost everyone you ask: people involved in advertising and PR would say that "media" means the press (journalists). Some people would say that "media" means blank CDs and DVDs - as in, blank media. And others (definitely the minority) would say that "media" in the context of the word "digital" means different digital audio/video/photo formats.

The team and I kicked around a variety of different names over the period of nearly a year, but I kept coming back to Digital Home Thoughts. It's immediately understandable that the site is about digital devices in the home - some people might think it's about home automation, but I'll gladly take that over someone thinking the site is about blank DVDs. ;-) So you're not going to see much of a change in content focus; we plan on covering pretty much everything we did before, focusing on all sorts of consumer electronics and software, focusing especially on things related to capturing/creating/sharing photos, audio, and video. We've got the same great team of Jeremy, Suhit, Chris, and myself serving up the editorial goodness (and we're looking for new editors, so start posting in the forums and I'll be watching).

It was an extremely rough ride, because we decided to launch this new site at the same time as we were fighting with serious issues on both of our two servers (there's a story yet to be told there). A very big thanks to our lead developer/designer, Fabrizio Fiandanese, for working hard (and fast!) on getting the new template set up. And special thanks as well to Jorj and Janak for all their help with the server. I couldn't have done this without them.

You'll notice a bunch of changes: the new logo, and re-designed set of forums, the unified login that is now shared with Smartphone Thoughts and Zune Thoughts, and many other smaller things. Our home page has bigger ads, but it's also wider (more big-screen monitor friendly) and our content column is bigger - which means larger images and screenshots from the editorial team. As I said, the transition to the new site was anything but smooth, so you'll have to excuse the rubble - not everything is working just yet, including our weekly newsletter.

To make it up to you, I've arranged for a series of giveaway contests to take place over the next few weeks. With prizes from Corel, Microsoft, Audioengine, FotoFusion, and a $999 grand prize from Orb Audio (the Mod1 Plus system), you definitely want to stick around (make sure you're registered in our forums).

If you have any problems, please report them here in this thread. You may need to reset your password with vBulletin if you can't log in, but beyond that everything should have transferred over OK.