During Massimo’s keynote speech at Maker Faire New York, we have taken the opportunity of stopping our server for some minutes to implement the new layout to the server, but also to clean up some things. I am taking the chance to make a quick summary of everything we have been doing during the last two months:

– improved layout: we counted with the Italian Studio ToDo to redesign our logo, they also gave a hand with the boards, the packaging, the web … you will notice our official color (blue) has got a touch of orange and that there is a consistent look and feel throughout wiki, blog and documentation. The forum is about to come, just give us some time

– new ways of bringing content to the blog: just because we didn’t want to roll out all the changes at once, about two weeks ago we introduced the possibility of counting with contributors to the blog. Since we started we are registering an average of 3Gb more traffic on a daily basis. As soon as we have had a rest from the Maker Faire experience, we will be opening up for anyone to post their projects to the blog, under the supervision of a moderator

– improved twitter integration: we have implemented the automatic posting to twitter, some of you might have also noticed that your twitter answers to @arduinoteam end up showing on our blog. It is our goal to integrate both platforms in a way that it will be possible for users to have conversations between both media

– improved code layout on the documentation, but also on the playground: if you want to include code in the playground, we have included a wiki recipe called “sourceblock” that allows including both local and remote pieces of code. The code on the documentation site comes directly from the official svn repository in Google Code, in this way we have the security the examples on the website correspond to the same code that comes with your IDE. We are using the project Geshi to bring life to the code, if you are interested in the module we made, we have created a patch called arduino.php that color codes your programs with Arduino’s color schema. Take a look at this example to see how it looks

– cleaned away wikis that hadn’t been updated in a long time: The arduino.cc/it, arduino.cc/hu, and arduino.cc/kr sites are now linking to arduino.cc/en. If we can create a proper translation team in any of those languages, we will go back and take the job. So far it is possible to document in all those (and potentially any) languages directly on the playground which is actually much more accessed than any of those sites. On the other hand, arduino.cc/es and arduino.cc/fr are much more up to date and register a lot of traffic, we will keep on working with those sites just to make sure we can channel all those efforts to help as many people as possible. The above-mentioned wikis haven’t been erased, we have backups of them, in case anyone is interested

– improved step by step documentation: this is probably the most exciting of the things we are presenting today besides the hardware. Tom, together with Christian Cerrito and Kate Hartman, have made a HUGE effort in documenting every example with a Fritzing drawing, a schematic and a piece of color coded source. This can be printed directly, your basic Arduino book can now literally be made straight from our website!!

You might think we are done with this, but we are just taking off. In the next couple of months we will improve the way you access our servers, unify passwords and usernames, link you with your favorite web 2.0 community, fix the forum (yeah!), and some more surprises you cannot even imagine yet.