The Best Blog in the World

The BeStuff Team has been hard at work on a slew of new features for BeStuff.com. And all of them are ready for use right now. We boosted the security to give you more privacy, allow you to add images via URL, and a host of other features. Read the full list below.

Menu Drop-Down
A global menu that allows access to different areas within your profile.

Enhanced Text Editor
A new text editor, courtesy of TinyMCE, makes writing descriptions and comments better than ever. You now have more stylization options, can create hyperlinks, and easily link to other stuff.

Timed Comment Editing
Now you can edit those embarrassing spelling mistakes.

Additional Information
Hover over images and categories to see who added them.

Comment Notification
You can now adjust your settings to receive an e-mail notification when you get any new profile comments.

Comment Ordering
A new setting that allows for new comment ordering options.

You may have noticed something interesting happening to our URL address? Yep, you’ve guessed it, we’re changing our name to Bestuff.com

“But why the change to Bestuff?”

We’ve been thinking about shortening our name for a while now. Having a URL name that’s 22 letters long may not have been the smartest move on our behalf. Initially we thought that sometimes the most obvious name is the best and it’s kind of cute in a simple down-to-earth way, however there’s a few drawbacks:

1. It’s a damn long name. Real long. I get cramped fingers typing it out, although maybe that’s just me just getting old.
2. If we use a regular sized subdomain ( i.e. movies.thebeststuffintheworld.com ) then that starts becoming an even sillier length of characters.
3. We want to have a wanky Web 2.0 name!
4. Typing out our acronym TBSITW is just as annoying as writing out our full name.
5. Look, it’s just a really long name, ok?

“Ok, ok, we get it. But what does Bestuff mean?”

When Adrian and I first built the site, we had no idea how it would actually be used. Initially, we thought it might become a consumer-driven product review website where people shared their favourite things and advised others about consumer stuff. Like an online ‘customer choice’ magazine. How wrong were we?! Among the first stuff to be added to the site was:

• “1 hour of good and relaxing sex”
• “Splashing in puddles”
• “To Crush Your Enemies, See Them Driven Before You, And To Hear The Lamentation Of The Women!”
• “When everything works out OK”

All in the category The Best Things in Life!

As the site evolved we realized that by adding ‘best stuff’ we were creating an inventory of all the things that made us individuals. Looking at member profiles became like peeking in someone’s shopping trolley at Safeway, or looking through the books on their shelf. The Best Stuff in the World had developed a social dimension that we could never have anticipated.

Taking this into account, we thought about the name change long and hard as we didn’t want to move away too far from “the Best Stuff in the World”, but we wanted something short and sweet. Since our central focus is “Best Stuff”, we just combined the two words together to form bestuff. Also as the site became a personal list of favorite stuff, ‘bestuff’ can also be taken as ‘be stuff’, as in “you are what you like”.

The change from thebeststuffintheworld.com to bestuff.com is not only URL expedient, it captures (we hope) the way the site has mutated into a place where people truly do discover and share the best things in life, and how that process defines them as an individual.

We think that the name change is a good thing, we hope you do too!

The team at TBSITW are normally a humble bunch, but what the hell:

We’ve been nominated for the 2007 Webby Award for Best Navigation/Structure!

We’ve also been selected as an Official Honoree for Best Visual Design – Function category and that’s just as cool too.

If you’re wondering what on earth is a Webby, think of it as the “Online Oscars” for the web industry. TBSITW is up for two awards, The Webby Award (chosen by our peers) and The Webby People’s Voice Award (chosen by you).

The lil’ crew here at TBSITW feel honoured to be selected for such an award, but really it’s all of our members that make our site so great. Seriously, here’s a really big, fat, massive thank you to all of you guys and gals!

So in the spirit of shameless self promotion our website, if you think The Best Stuff in the World is, err…, well the best, then vote for us using the steps below.

How to vote for us:

1. Register to vote and follow the steps listed.

2. Once you have registered and logged into the Webbys site, you can vote for us here.

What an exhausting month. Yours truly moved back down to Melbourne, and finally settled in. Luke did it the month previous, and has been running the ship since then. We have some exciting news, but we’ll get to that later, in another blog post.

So we’ve had a good/bad situation with the site. The good thing is that we are even getting more traffic. The bad thing is that our shiny new server has not been able to handle it. It was so bad earlier that I had to sit down and work out what was bottlenecking. A few hours later, we have something that I think is an improvement. We’ll see tomorrow how we go when the American guys and gals go to work and start pounding the server again.

You may have noticed the Lunarpages sponsorship at the bottom of each page. As we’ve mentioned we are pretty impressed with them. If you already host with them go and vote for them. If you are not, and are looking for some hosting, Lunarpages have some coupon codes to save you money on their annual hosting plans. The Lunarpages Coupon Code is BestStuff27 which you put in the coupon field when you sign up.

I was just about to move servers yesterday, and just as I was about to pull the proverbial switch, we had a blackout! If the adsl modem was on battery power like the laptop, I could have done it. So we sat down and watched the latest episode of Heroes. A few hours later the power came back on. I pretty much missed the low traffic window.

Oh well, we’ll try again in a few hours time.

It didn’t take long, but we have again out grown our current server with the rapid growth of TBSITW.

Thankfully Lunarpages have come to our rescue and will be sponsoring us. This week I have been setting up the new server at Lunarpages, and have been thoroughly impressed with the support staff. I was curious to see how they would treat the average customer, so I never mentioned to the support staff that their company was sponsoring us. I have never before experienced support that’s fast and thorough. It’s a relief. I’m in Australia, and usually when we send a support query to a service provider, at the minimum they would get back to us in an hour, usually the following day, and in the case of Dreamhost, when they could be bothered (and usually with an useless answer, so you have to send another email and wait). One day I should write an article about the different hosts out there, and what you can expect.

Anyway the guys at Lunarpages get a big thumbs up from me.

Now the point I was making – we will be down on Sunday Monday as we move all the data over to the new servers. This year will be pretty exciting as we bring you guys a whole bunch of exciting new features.