It has been a long time coming, but InfoBarrel 2.0 will be launching tonight at around midnight.

InfoBarrel will be unavailable for a few hours starting tonight around 10:30pm PST (1:30am EST) and will be down until we have the complete conversion setup.

There will probably be a number of hiccups over the next couple of days, so make sure you create any content locally in a word processor to ensure no content is lost.

In the mean time, if you would like a sneak peak at the upcoming version of InfoBarrel, take a look at our preview over at Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income.

As some people are aware, Google is beginning to crack down on content they believe to be low quality.  As a result we are going to start being more strict on what we consider quality content.

Moving forward all content published on InfoBarrel must be high quality and must provide actual value to the user.  Articles created to be doorway pages for search engine optimization will not be published.  A contextual link within an article that provides value to the reader is not a problem, however an article that talks about “Tips for purchasing pink rugs” that rambles on common sense about pink rugs and fails to deliver on it’s title will no longer be accepted.

Our goal is to create a very high quality database of content that is helpful to people of all walks of life.

If you come across an article that appears to be a doorway page for SEO, please flag it so we can keep this place the best place to publish content.

We are not planning on doing any mass deletes, or anything along those lines, however if one of your articles becomes flagged we will send you an email with the article in question and ask you to resolve the issue within a reasonable time frame.

For more information on what Google considers a doorway page, please see the following page: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66355&hl=en

For those of you who aren’t constantly monitoring the InfoBarrel forum, I’d like to introduce to you a bunch of changes and updates we’ve done to the site.

This week has been very busy here and we have plenty of cool new things to announce. So without further adieu, here is what we’ve done.

UserVoice Feedback Button – Gone
After a year of complaints about the Feedback button on the side of the site either interfering with functions of the site or slowing the site down we’ve decided to remove it.  Between our community forum and our contact us form, we feel there is more than enough options for providing feedback.

Navigation Bar
We’ve received a lot of feedback that having the expandable navigation bar at the top of the site made it difficult for new users to figure out how to post content.  To rectify this, once you’ve logged in, the navigation bar will now stay open.

Forum Speed
The forum was running kind of slow before so we tweaked a few pieces of code to dramatically speed it up.

Forum Post Count
Interested in knowing how many times you’ve posted on the forum? We now have a  statistic to show you exactly how many posts you’ve made.

Duplicate Image Titles
Previously when uploading an image to the site, if a similar image with the same title existed, you would have to reupload your picture with a different title.  This feature has been updated so even if an image exists with the same title, it won’t stop you from creating another.

Category Functionality
In the past, people were having issues finding the correct category to publish their articles in.  The method we employed to hunt down you category was just plain difficult to use.  We’ve implemented a new method that shows you your category structure in a treed out view.  We’ve also provided a search function that will give you numerous suggestions if you type in a keyword.

Auto Tweet
One of the keys to making money on any web site is exposure.  Our goal at InfoBarrel is to supply our contributors with the absolute largest arsenal of tools to maximize the traffic and revenue to their content.  Our latest feature allows you to authenticate your Twitter account with InfoBarrel and whenever you publish an article, InfoBarrel will automatically post a link to your article with the article title on your Twitter page.  This might only take a minute or two to do by hand, but we believe the more time we can save you in the promotional department, the more time you have to focus on creating great content.

Today is a monster milestone for Infobarrel.com as we finally surpass the 10,000 unique article mark!

We launched July 31st 2008, and didn’t crack the 1000 article mark until late March 2009, but the site is growing at an amazing rate.  Hopefully six months from now we will be blogging about reaching the 100,000 article mark!

Here are some fun facts about InfoBarrel and where it stands as of today:

Official 10,000th article: Hitachi 18V

Total Members: 4283

Average articles per user: 2.33

Average articles per active user: 10.24

Total written words across all articles: 5,070,365

Total Comments: 3042

Comments per user:  0.71

Comments per active user: 4.39

Current Alexa Ranking: 18,267

Current Technorati Rating: 1993

There you have it ladies and gentlemen, over a years worth of hard work has led to this milestone.  I’m excited to see what the future has in store for us.  Keep up all the fantastic work, this place wouldn’t be where it is today without your hard work and contributions!

Hey everybody,

Over the last month we were starting to run into some server issues thanks to the tremendous growth we’ve been seeing.  You probably noticed the server was running slower than normal and issues were popping up left, right and center.

In order to allow for substantially more growth we’ve completed a major migration to a MUCH more powerful server.  Double the CPU cores, double the RAM and double the hard drive space.  What this means for all the members of Infobarrel should be much quicker load times, and hopefully more people sticking around reading your content.

If you do happen to run into any bugs, please make sure to contact us.  We’ve taken every precaution to make sure this goes as smoothly as possible (outside of the mysql errors yesterday), but sometimes things slip through the cracks.
Thanks!

Ryan

While videos are not intended to be the main content source on Infobarrel, we did decide to give them a little bit of exposure on the front page of the site.  If you go to http://www.infobarrel.com, under ‘Featured Article’ you will see a block of five image thumbnails that link to the five latest video contributions on the site.

PS – Please bare with us as we iron out a few little bugs.