For being a Spaniard, this -my 10th- winter in Sweden is going to be hard to forget. It has been snowing like never before, I had to start wearing two pairs of socks, stopped having sugar in the coffee because of how much I would drink by the end of the day, couldn’t ride my bike to work for weeks …

Rumor says Linus Torvalds wrote his first Kernel during a very cold winter in Finland, making an analogy, we have spent quite a lot of time troubleshooting the website getting things done slowly, in the shadow. Some changes are more popular than others (I know some of you are not liking the forum’s layout) but we are not done yet. We need your comments to work this out. Jokes about how things look like are good, but much better is constructive criticism and proposals on how to make things better. thanks to all of you contributing in one way or the other.

We have a new collaborator –Davide Gomba– dedicated to clean up the spam and to try things out in the forum, among many other things. He has been with us for more than a week speeding up some of the very annoying tasks when running a website like Arduino’s. Please welcome him to our small family of  prototypers, you will meet him often.

Talking about speed, seems like the last two days things have gone slow in the server during US time. You should know we are monitoring this, it is something we haven’t seen before and we have our service provider -ServInt- looking at it together with us. We hope to have it solved during the weekend. If the error shows up today again, it should be quite simple to debug it. If not … we’ll have to wait until the next time it happens.

There are some other news:

* we included the service addthis for you to add any of the Arduino URLs to your favourite Social Network like Twitter, Facebook, you say it … there are over 200 different services within addthis

* we created friendly error messages for the site. Now if the server times out, you won’t get the white page any longer. It is not as cute as at some other websites, but we featured one of the oldest Arduino boards I could find in my drawer as the official “things are getting slow” picture

* the blog’s twitter module has been updated to the latest version, now it links won’t break the layout any longer, just look at the sidebar on the right

* the forum’s layout is being reworked, please be patient with us, we are going to make it easy to read

* in parallel and thanks to a very friendly French user (X. Hinault) we are going to prepare the new reference in French, I will be porting it to the official arduino.cc/fr soon.

And now, back to the hot pot of coffee.