Hi, guys. I just wanted to keep you up to date on the improvements I've been working on for the site. As you probably know, a few months ago we imported the full Pololu product catalog into our Components section, and we've been talking about ways to make use of that nice big database we now have.
Frits came up with a lot of great ideas, and we settled on a plan for a new and much more useful reimplementation of the components section. The new components section will make it much easier for you to find and link to the components you've used in your robot, in order to encourage discussion about the components everyone's using. The changes are pretty significant and there's a good bit of work left to do, but I'm excited about it and think it'll be a great improvement to the site.
In order to help expand that database even more, I've been talking with the guys at Solarbotics about bringing their products into the site as well. We're specifically seeking out the companies that design and produce new and interesting parts, rather than simple resellers of standard products, because we want to build up the database with a wide selection of the stuff that we're all actually interested in using, like gear motors, tank treads, etc.
Solarbotics was excited to work with us, and agreed to let us import their products too, so I've been working on implementing that. In the next few days you'll start seeing Solarbotics items show up in the components section. Just like last time, the new components won't show up on the front page, but they'll be visible by browsing the Components section and in your list of Unread Posts.
When we added the Pololu items a few months ago, we added all 300 items at once, and some people complained about the overwhelming flood of new nodes. This time, in order to alleviate that, we're only going to be adding 15 items per day. That should put less of a burden on those of you who take pride in your 100% nodes read status (I'm looking at you, rik :).
As always, your comments are welcome. Let's Make Robots is your site, and you're encouraged to provide any feedback you may want to share. Thanks.
Dan
