We all want news, and many of us are waiting with baited breath. So, when we have a bunch of news at once, we can wonder. Is this really good news, or are we just hoping? Well, we have some news from the Official blog. I hope everyone is as excited as I am.
EvilDragon
Chinese New Year holidays are over – work has begun at the factory!
Evil Dragon has updated the official blog with more information about the prototype cases. They should be finished by friday, to be sent off for CE testing.
Well, all the errors of the case files have been fixed – and the final prototype cases are now in production!
They will be finished and shipped out on Friday, huzzah!After that happened, we need to do stability and CE tests as quickly as possible, and if everything is fine, the moulds will be produced.
The production of the moulds will take about 30 – 35 days, however, once they are finished, the company can produce 50.000 units a day… should be enough for us. The good thing is, that the company that produces the moulds and the case is exactly the same company that made the prototype cases, so we won’t have any file export errors this time.
More after the break!
We now have tomvas (Tom` on the forums), thebutterman (Butterman on the forums) and poisonedv (same name on the forums) on our blog team!
Good luck to the new members!
From EvilDragon:
Hiya!
Didn’t find as much time as I hoped I’d find to continue the model and renderings of the Pandora, but here is another small sneak peak
I guess you will like it, as it solves the mystery about the LEDs.
Again, click on the thumbnail to increase the picture size a bit.
Also, the FDM case did arrive at Michael Weston’s home and he has successfully assembled a Pandora using the LCD, the board, the prototype battery and the prototype keymat. EVERYTHING FITS!
I hope he finds some time to make some nice pictures soon!
The blog theme and layout has been changed repeatedly based on the desires of many different readers, and yet some people are still not satisfied – some apparently so unsatisfied that they’ve stopped reading the blog. To remedy this, I’ve posted a poll on the forums asking which layout/theme you’d prefer, and I will go with whichever has the most votes. You’ll find that each option has a compromise, whether it’s not having a custom image at the top, or being forced to read a page just 800 pixels wide. Choose wisely!
UPDATE: The people have spoken – the majority appear to be in favour of keeping the current blog, at least for now. We’ll keep it as it is until the Pandora’s out in April/May or so.
I felt that the old theme was far too busy – so I’m currently trying out cleaner looks for the blog. In addition, I’m currently rearranging and changing some widgets, so things may looks slightly bizarre for a time, and the entire theme may change as I experiment. Please give your feedback and suggestions!
I should note that this isn’t the end of tweakage. If we can find a way to easily add a header graphic, that’d be great – note that we’d have to purchase the custom CSS upgrade for the blog.
In addition, what do people feel about removing the tag cloud? I felt it was redundant given that you can simply search them using the search bar.
EDIT: Has anyone else noticed how much faster the blog is now? 
It would appear there is another German language Pandora blog – http://pandora-blog.de/ – for those that are interested.
I’m getting slightly addicted to the blog stats – but here’s a graph that shows the amount of visits we’ve been getting over the past few days. Note that today, we’re already up to 1,600+ visits, meaning today might be the first time we break the 2,000 visits barrier, after just over a week!
All I can say (and I’m sure the rest of the blog team are behind me on this) is thanks for all your support, suggestions, contributions and visits! We hope we’re making things a lot, lot easier for people hunting for news, as well as truly showing the amount of activity that such a project produces.
- The Blog Team
It’s interesting to see where the referrers are for the blog. Most come from mazza558’s post and links in sigs.
After that we are getting a fair amount of traffic from alphainventions.com and Netvibes.com. alphainventions is likely to be bringing external traffic – so hi to any newcomers from there! Netvibes is, amongst others things a very good feed reader and an excellent way of storing all your bookmarks on the internet. You can have a nice set up that shows various columns and a magazine format. When used in Firefox in a separate tab you can see how man new feeds there are unread. Worth a try and is my favourite because of the great bookmarks feature.
We are also listed in the information index – which is nice to see that this blog has been recognised as a valuable resource. With over 1200 visits so far today, something must be right. Please feel free to put the links on other sites.
Ah, it seems we have competition from mainland Europe! There is now a (similar) German blog which can be found at http://today.openpandora.org/. They have found a nice pandora loading screen, which I shamelessy share with you. After the link for those that want to keep it a surprise.
Update: According to ED, this should be in the next version of the OS in the next video.
If you’re reading this, you’ll have noticed that the brackets are gone from each post. Instead, each post is categorised seperately. This makes it easier to quickly read specific categories – if you only want to read the official updates from developers themselves, for example, just click “official” on the new menu on your left. Tags still stay for now, and serve as a more specific way of showing a post’s nature.
I’m currently looking into whether it’s possible to have RSS feeds for each category – that’d truly make things easy.
I hope this makes it easier for everyone!
The response from the wider community has been phenomenal. Looking at the blog stats, just under 1,000 people visited the blog on the first day alone. Here’s a screenshot of what I’m seeing at the moment, including where peeople are coming from:
This blog was inspired by a GP32X forum user who pointed out the lack of an RSS feed on the official OpenPandora website. It will provide several categories of news, all in one place:
This way, you can click on a tag to find out the latest news on that category.
Since I felt bad for taking the openpandora name for the URL of this blog, should the developers wish to take it over and incorporate it into their website, I am happy to hand over power. In addition, it’d be daft to put the task of reporting every small bit of news on one person’s shoulders, so other people in the community can put their names forward if they want to participate. They can then take up the mantle of responsibility for one particular category, like [hardware].
Of course, such people will have to be regular forum users with an understanding of what constitutes news – but I’m sure this isn’t too hard to find.
Pandora Press: The unofficial community blog is Digg proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache
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