September 1st, 2003 
Spoono v4 Out
Alright, after much await and working all summer, Spoono v4 is finally out. You can view it by going to http://www.spoono.com . Yayyyyyy 
Well here's a list of new features:
Seven Fruity Flavors of Fun
The idea Spoono?s layout changing colors daily originated back in the early days of planning v2, but now it hear for real. By default, Spoono will rotate colors, starting with Blueberry on Monday through Grape on Sunday. Users may also choose their favorite flavor and have Spoono permanently stay that way. All you have to do is use our handy Flavor navigator. There is also an option to switch back to the flavor "Du Jour" and have the colors rotate again. The flavors each contain different background textures, navigation, and more. Our tutorial layouts now come in three different styles as well. We kept the monkey style from v3 that many have come to love as one of them. These styles do not rotate, however, because we didn?t wish to cause any unnecessary nausea.
OMG Spoono Loads Faaaaaaaaast!
After 3 designed of increasingly complex nested table layouts, Spoono has broken free and now basks in the brilliant light of tableless design. For the first time ever, Spoono is 100% standards compliant. V4 makes wonderfully efficient use CSS and XHTML 1.0 Transitional markup to achieve a look similar to our previous designs, yet run incredibly faster. To give you an idea of the bandwidth we will be saving, the main page of v3 including all images and content was 259k, the main page of v4 with even more content is a mere 107k. (Dial-up users rejoice!) We also converted all the tutorials and the Grapevine news feed to XML to ease syndication and tutorial writing. One drawback of our modern coding techniques is that Spoono will not work in Netscape 4 and below and the navigation will not work in Opera 6 and below. Are we sad? Not a bit. The many things we did to improve the coding of our site will be topics of many new tutorials, so if you?d like to know how we did anything, feel free to ask.
Art Box Surfaces
We added a new content area to our main page called the Art Box, which contains featured artwork. Users may submit images, flash, or videos and have their work and information posted on our main page. We plan to add new artwork every week or two according to supply.
Fresh Meat Ready for the Fire
We streamlined the new content display on our main page into the new Fresh Meat area. It displays the newest tutorials and other items added for any of our main content sections.
My, my, How the Organization Has Changed
We have reorganized our content so that each major content topic, such as Photoshop and PHP, has its own page containing the newest additions to all the types of content we have relating to that topic. So, now users having to go to tutorials and then Photoshop to find Photoshop tutorials, and going to Downloads and Photoshop to find Photoshop Downloads, they can visit the new Photoshop page and access all the different types of Photoshop tutorials, styles, actions, textures, brushes, our new book reviews, and our new Photoshop discussion board all from the same place.
Spoono?s Backend Eats Its Spinach
Though the Spoono Backend still runs on PHP and mySQL, it has been completely re-written and re-coded, a feat which hasn?t been done since we first started using PHP in version 2. Each one of the hundreds of tutorials, articles, and interviews has been re-coded in XML. The speed on loading each tutorial has gone down by an average of 24%. The overall code speed on the main page has gone down by over 88%. The reorganization has also completely changed the structure on our mySQL tables. Currently, Spoono uses over 65 mySQL database tables to control everything on our website. The Administration Panel has also gotten a face lift and though follows the same format, has changed drastically. Each section has its own Admin Panel which can control everything from the ads displayed in that area, to the tutorials which are being displayed to the visitor.
What Happened to the Desktop Downloads?!
In order to focus Spoono into more of a web design learning portal, we have removed the wallpapers, fonts, and other desktop downloads from Spoono and plan to display them on Spoonloads, a new website we are working on which will function as a showcase of top notch desktop downloads and skins.
New Web Hosting Section
We started a new section called Web Hosting which contains a top ten web hosts list and web hosting articles (which for some reason are somewhat rare on the web). Our selection of web hosting articles is small at the moment, since it is very new, but with time, we hope to cover a wide range of topics including how to use many server administration packages, how to perform various maintenance activities, and good ways to secure one?s site.
Links Reorganized
We took our rather disheveled links section and moved many of the links to new ?Featured Resources? pages which can be accessed from the right column of main content pages. A few links appear randomly in the right columns, and the full archive of resources can be accessed by a link.
Book Reviews
We have started to feature one or more books for each of our major content sections to provide further reading and excellent references for the topics we cover in our tutorials.
Funky Fresh Navigation System
Our new navigation system, run by CSS and Javascript wizardry, changes with every flavor. The submenus in the navigation have been changed from v3, and now much of our content is organized under the "Graphics" and "Programming" submenus.
New Sponsors Area
We apologize to for the slight increase in advertising to help us cover the mother of a new server we just moved to, but we believe we have organized it in a very discrete and unobtrusive way. Users will never experience another pop-up ad on our site, and our new Google Ads even match our layout flavors (not so bad, eh). We also put up a small section on the bottom of our main page containing two small sponsor banners and text links. The same style of sponsor links also appear on the right columns of our interior pages.
Spoono Becomes Legal
In June, we registered Spoono as a limited liability company in the state of Pennsylvania in order to legitimatize our financial transactions for Spoono and our other web projects, simply some tax issues, and protect our posterior quarters if we were to ever get sued. So for legal purposes, Spoono is now a fully owned entity of Spoono, LLC.
Discussion Boards Coming out of the Woodwork
In v4, we added a huge amount of discussion boards throughout the site, allowing users to now post comments on every tutorial. We also created general discussion boards for each topic which can be accessed on the main content pages.
Poll Goes Pie
We changed our Voting Booth poll on the main page to display the data in pie chart form. Why? Because with thought it was cool.
Staff Expands
We picked up a few new Grapevine posters and section admins to help us keep the content flowing and maintain the ever-expanding content sections of the site.
Codebase Returns from the Grave
We revived parts of our old Codebase section from v2 and created a new Freeware Scripts area of the PHP section. We didn?t yet have time to add as many new scripts as we would have liked, but we will as soon as possible.
New CSS Section
We created a brand new CSS section containing a wide variety of CSS tutorials, some of which used to live in the HTML section of v4.
New XML Section
We made a new XML section containing tutorials about this powerful, universal language that helps make Spoono so super.
Not HTML, Silly, It?s HTML/XHTML
We changed the title of the HTML section to reflect the overhaul we preformed on the HTML tutorials to reflect the latest XHTML standards and new XHTML specific tutorials we have added.
Primed and Ready
That about sums up the new features we?ve added to Spoono, at least all those that we can remember. We hope you enjoy the new Spoono and use it to its full potential. Learning about web design, and have a little fun doing it is what we?re all about. We hope that Spoono v4 helps you do that.
If you like v4, just wait, we have only begun...
___________________
- -- --- ---- ------ ------ -------
Akash Goel
Webmaster
www.spoono.com
www.tutorialforums.com
- -- --- ---- ------ ------ -------
