Happy Friday everyone!

I want to start by thanking all our supports/members - we are now only 5 away from unlocking the next tier here on Locals.

As a gift to all those supporters at the $2 or greater per month level, I will be posting coupons in the coming weeks to get my soon to be released eGuides for free! (more on that below.)

On to what's new, this week I rolled out phase 1 of the new design for TheAutomationBlog.com (TAB,) and I'll include a picture of it with this post. The biggest change is the background image is no more, and on most devices the website will take up your entire screen.

The next change is I've broken up all the content into three categories: News, Shows, and Articles. Then under that I have a placeholder of recent topics, and under that I have all the content sorted by product category, including Programmable Controllers, HMIs, Robotics, etc.

As part of this I went through all of the old TAM (The Automation Minute) episodes (over 250) and edited each one to conform to the new design. At some point I'll need to go through all the TAS (Show) and TAP (Podcast) shows to do the same, but that's likely something I'll do a little each day over the summer.

The bigger job is going back through all the articles and tagging them as "articles" since the software would not let me filter by not news and not shows. I've gotten through about 25% of all 1500+ articles, and will continue to work on this as well.

But the most exciting thing I'm working on are the new eGuides. I've already gone through all the major products I've covered (or hired freelancers to cover) and tagged the relevant articles with the appropriate Guide tag.

From here I'm working on some custom code to allow me to display these new categories in a customer order (instead of release date,) from introductory to advance.

At the same time I plan to create PDF eGuides for each of these topics which are similar to my ControlLogix Book of Knowledge, but unlike that BOK I won't be going through and updating all the articles and pictures since that could take literally hundreds of hours for each.

Once phase one of the Guides and eGuides are done, I'll next move on to experimenting with the new news format. For as much work as it was each day (5+ hours,) I do miss doing the daily show, and getting myself up to speed each day.

That said, I've already decided to do the show as a livestream to cut up to 2 hours out of the production time that I want to use elsewhere. But before I restart the show I want to have the second phase of AN (Automate.News) worked out.

I'm currently leaning towards posting each news story as a mini post on TAB since it gets over 32K unique visitors every month, where as AN only gets a few hundred because it's new. Then I may have AN display a list of those articles using RSS, or I may redirect AN to a dedicated news page on TAB - these are the things I have to work out prior to restarting the show.

One final note: as much as I wanted to go to Automate in a couple of weeks, I recent found out my car needed 3K+ worth of work which is going to be a struggle to pay for already, so without a sponsor to offset the cost of going to the Automate show it currently looks like I won't be attending.

That said, if you do go please thank P&F, FlexIV, Antaira, and CaPow for coming on The Automation Podcast as all three will be there.

Well, that's it for today. Thanks again to everyone who is a support, and I want to wish you all an awesome weekend!

Until next time,

Shawn Tierney