Blog stories

After last months milestone of going over 10,000 approved rating, today we have reached another milestone. We now have 200 machines that have passed the 6 votes treshold!

  Click here to read more...

Pinside.com announces a cool new feature for all Pinball collectors out there: The Pinside.com Marketwatch.

The Pinside Market Watch monitors classifieds ads on the internet and notifies you when machines on your wishlist are spotted. This allows you to be among the first to bid on those items and to get your hand on those hard to get pinball machines before someone else does. For now, we have started with Ebay and of course the ads from our own Pinside Marketplace but we may add other ad sites in the future.   Click here to read more...

Just a quick blog to let you know that I have introduced a new feature on the site: Rating Comments!

From now on, anyone rating a machine can leave a comment along with their rating. Tell people why you rated the machine like you have and climb on the soapbox to tell anyone why a particular machine is great - or not so great - and why they should or should not consider buying one!   Click here to read more...

Ah, this weekend finally gave me some time for mayor bug-shooting operations on the Pinside! Bug shooting? Well, yeah, you know... Computer bugs. Errors in the code. Even a great site like the Pinside has some of these microscopic creatures (ahem, quite a lot of 'em to be honest).

You see, ever since the launch of our new site, back in May of this year, we have added a little contact button in the header of each page. We didn't expect to get much people to actually use it, but boy, we were wrong. Quite a lot of you take the time and trouble to report a bug to us. Which (although it being bad news to receive a bug) we really, really appreciate. How else can we make the site stay working properly? So please keep the bug reports coming in using the contact form!   Click here to read more...

After weeks of moving pixels around, we are proud to present our new logo!

The new logo needed to have some ties to the old one: we wanted to have a fat typeface, like the old logo and which is quite common in pinball design. We wanted to keep our blue-and-yellow ball as it is already so recognisable and it has served us so well these past eight years.  We wanted flippers. Huh? Yeah, haven't you spotted them yet?   Click here to read more...

If you're the watchful type, you'll probably have gathered that something has changed about the site. Something feels different? What is it?

Well for starters, let's just say that I got a bit tired of the background image. It was a bit to busy the way it was, and so I decided to replace it with a very subtle striped gradient.   Click here to read more...

We're well into the fourth month now, after the great Pinside.com redesign of April 2008 and thinks have fallen a little silent on our end. Of course we have been monitoring the site and fixing small bugs (some of which have been reported by you, thanks for that!). But then, inevitably, other work came round and before we knew it we had not more than one hour, maybe two, per week to spend on the Pinside.

You see, as much as wel love maintaining and building cool new features for the Pinside, money needs to be made as well. We can't live on silver balls alone! Martijn and I just started our own webdesign firm and we're trying to get some cool projects. But unfortunately, any time spent on those is time not spent on the Pinside.   Click here to read more...

After a whole lotta work we introduce a new feature in the site's Top 100 section. The "Bang for your Buck" list! Go on, take a look!

So what is this list all about?  How does it come to be? Read on!   Click here to read more...

Wow! After launching last thursday, a lot has already happened to the site. As visitors old and new came in (I keep trying to picture their faces as they come in and discover the new look) and search spiders crawled to index the new pages, the long and tedious (and very technical) process of optimalization set in.

I won't bore you with all the technicalities, but launching a site redesign like we did with the Pinside is a huge challenge. And after the launch you inevitably discover stuff that isn't supposed to happen. On a test system, where it's just you on the site, these bugs won't always surface, but as soon as the crowds come in, you'll notice bad performing pages all over the place! Databases squeeking, webservers grinding... Aaargh!   Click here to read more...

Ah, a new feature! Always good to hear, right? This time it's a new tab in the pinsiders section. This tab, called ratings, shows the users personal top X (where X is the amount of pinball machines that the user has rated).

So, for instance, to check out my ratings, go here:   Click here to read more...

Knock, knock... Hello there! You're still with us?

If you're a regular visitor to the Pinside your first reaction might have been 'Yikes! What's that?' when you visited your favorite pinball hangout this morning. Well, I can't blame you, as actually quite a bit has changed. We administrators figured that after almost 8 years the Pinside could do with some freshing up. So we decided to clean out the attic, to repaint the walls and to expand the living room a bit. Giving the Pinside a fresh, new look and some interesting new features.   Click here to read more...

Phew... Pff... Oh, hey there! Welcome to the first blog post by Robin. Why am I making these strange sounds you ask? Well, after nearly four months of hard work on the new website and I'm finally seeing some light at the end of a long tunnel.

Lemme introduce myself for a bit: I live in the Northwest of Holland with my beatiful girlfriend Adeline, two crazy cats and only one pinball machine in the garage (but luckily some more nearby). I have been playing the silverball game for as long as I can remember (you can read more about that on my profile page) and  started building Pinside.com in early 2001 just to learn something. Running this site for the last 7 years indeed thaught me a heck of a lot about programming, webdesign and stuff like that and thanks to all the positive feedback I always remained enthousiastic about the -sometimes time consuming- job of maintaining this site.   Click here to read more...