I've added a drop-down list for filtering reviews by category. Hopefully this should help everyone find reviews more quickly. I'm planning to add a reviews-specific search as well sometime soon.

Enjoy!

After thinking about our commenting system for quite some time and observing how users interact in the forums, we've decided to disable anonymous commenting throughout the site. Anonymous commenting was initially open so that newcomers would feel welcome at the site while it was still relatively new. At this point, we're encouraging membership to grow our community.

Members who sign up and post will be able to win prizes we give away and hopefully stick around to help others out with their iPhones. If you have any feedback regarding our comments, let us know in... well, the comments. :]

You may have noticed that we had some downtime earlier this morning. I don't think it lasted for more than two hours, but everything is working smoothly now.

In other news, we're currently trying out a new site tracker and analytics system called Woopra. It's still in beta, but it has some amazing features that I've never seen before. One of them is the ability to see people visiting the site in real time in the style of a map overlay. Extremely cool. We can also strike up a conversation with anyone visiting the site with no additional plugins or software necessary.

Now, because Woopra is still in beta, we're not sure if it's having any adverse effects on the site. They assure us that it won't, but we'd like to hear from you guys. If you notice any problems, email me personally (Michael[at]iphonealley).

We're also working on some new features. I can't really say what they are because they're not finished. I can say that one of them is going to be big, at least I think so. It should be nearing completion soon, hopefully ready for use by the end of the month.

The other features that everyone's requested are still in queue (iPhone-formatted version, etc).

I think we've needed a "blog" around here for a while. I say this because, although the "News" section is kind of a blog, it's more of a "news blog". There's plenty of other information that we want to share that simply cannot be categorized as "news", but a "blog blog" handles that sort of thing well (oy, semantics).

So this is it.

I'll be talking about apps and other things I like, things I don't, posting random bits of information about the site, experiences I have with iPhone, etc. Basically everything else I feel like sharing. I'll try to stay on the topic of "iPhone", but I can't promise anything. Maybe I'll stick with "Apple" so things don't get too out of hand.