After a (very, very long) hiatus, PhoneNews.com Video is making a comeback. This time, we have all new equipment that allows us to cut, prep, and upload video in under five minutes.

That’s hot.

So, expect to see a lot of video on PhoneNews.com. This time around, streaming in 720p High Definition (in H.264), 480p Extended Definition (in MPEG-4), iPhone Version, and 3GPP2 mobile streams.

We’ve updated the PhoneNews.com Forums to IP.Board version 2.3.5. This fixes several core software issues with the forums, and makes various minor performance improvements.

We’ve also set up a known issues thread, which also doubles as a bug reporting tool for the forums. If you see a bug, post it there and we’ll get to the bottom of it.

Further improvements to the forum (mainly, SEO) will be rolled out next month, alongside a theme update.

It seems that the WordPress spam bots are alive and well. Our servers are being hammered by thousands of spam requests right now. Akismet, combined with our server’s hardware firewall, are repelling most of the attack. Still, we’re having to pull up pages of spam that pass through the net.

Fear not however, even if you see some spam, it’s not a sign that easy commenting is going away. We’ll be deploying some new schemes over the next couple of months that actually improve the comment experience.

And yes, that includes reply notifications if someone posts a reply to your comment.

For a couple of days, at least. The server team, in fixing one issue, accidentially vaporised our ad server. Unfortunately, the issue was with server backups. So, we now have our backups back online… sans the ad server.

I don’t have time to fix it. So enjoy ad-free PhoneNews.com for the next couple of days…

Update: Okay, it’s really dead. Sigh. I’ll have to rebuild from scratch. This time, we’ll be going with Google Ad Manager rather than OpenX. OpenX is nice, until it breaks. And apparently, it breaks at the drop of a log file (literally).

Update 2: A single character difference between the backup and lastest version of our code was the cause of the problem. Fixed. Google Ad Manager is nice, but fixing OpenX was better. The main problem with Ad Manager is that it’s new, and takes a super-corporate DoubleClick server, and tries to shoehorn it into simple, single-site ad management.

In short, this experience showed us that OpenX is the best solution now, but Google Ad Manager has the promise of improving…

Yes, it is missing. I’ve gotten a few emails about it from readers.

The reason that it is missing, is that the plugin we were using is not yet compatible with WordPress 2.5. The author of the plugin is working on fixing it, but the new version is still an unstable beta.

We’ll have it back online just as soon as it’s reliable.

No, I wasn’t finished tonight. I burned a considerable amount of midnight oil (that I shouldn’t have), and finished the complete look-and-feel for the Forums. It’s almost completely done, and in testing.

While the testing is going on by the staff, I’ll be putting in the finishing touches… all that’s left is re-adding the ads, and deploying the footer.

And, I do have to say, it looks very nice… you’ll be surprised at the level of integration that has been finished.

What? You thought I wasn’t going to drop a teaser? Click to enlarge…

The category widget (on the front page) now actually makes sense.

I was busy making some changes to the server, and I realized to myself “hey, this is a mess!”

So, it’s fixed. Goodnight.

WordPress 2.5.1 will be circulating the PhoneNews.com servers shortly… along with a few security improvements. Probably later tonight.

Giveaways will be coming back soon, likely within the next week or two. This time around, you’ll have to answer a few quick questions in the form of a survey. Then, you’ll be given a code to type in on an entry form.

What we’ll be giving away… to be honest, I don’t know yet. I do know that we’ll be giving away at least a few things, so there will definitely be first, second, third, etc prizes.

But, probably the best thing of all about the giveaway+survey, is that it will actually help us really improve PhoneNews.com. We don’t get a lot of opportunities to throw at you a bunch of “hey, what if…” concepts and ideas, so doing this will be a huge help.

We know a lot of you would participate without the giveaway, but we do want to thank you for taking the time to do it.

I just had to finish yet another complaint to Google against a splog site that is clearly stealing our content. I’d name the site, but we may have to file DMCA complaints should they chose to keep the content up.

Splogs are sites that copy content from various web sites and plug their advertising into it. Think of it as someone photocopying a book and selling it at retail, for the same price. Now, think of hundreds of thousands of those stores… and you start to see the effect it can have on search engines.

Let me be clear on this, to all you sploggers out there… it takes 10 minutes to send a DMCA complaint to your ISP and shut you down. And, we’re more than happy to do it. So, if you want to steal our content… do so at your own risk. Because, we don’t just go after the domain… we target the underlying server and offline hundreds thousands of splogs at once.

We take a very frank position at PhoneNews.com: content piracy is wrong. Now, we back that up with fighting for consumer rights. For example, if you pay for a DVD, you should be able to take that movie and put it on your iPhone… without any question. If you own (access to) content, you should be able to do what you want with it.

There are a couple of sad things about splogging. One, the corporate-owned blogs (ahem, AOL) seem to be doing nothing to combat this. They have legal teams on their own payroll, and yet they aren’t really taking any action against even the worst of offenders. This fuels the sploggers to keep going against everyone.

The other sad thing is… the poor sploggers won’t ever even probably read this post before pirating hundreds of articles from PhoneNews.com.

One of the things folks have asked for, for awhile now, is a single login back for the whole site.

And, we really want to make that happen. It will make you more likely to use services other than the news. Like, those forums, and that encyclopedia we’ve built.

The good news is, a project is under way to handle that. The bad news is, you won’t see it until this summer at the earliest. It requires major renovations to just about every part of the site… which requires massive amounts of testing time.

We also have to have a lot of additional support online. Every update and patch will have to be tested a lot more before its deployed… so we’ll have to undertake setting all that up first too.