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.

In April of 2007, my brother and I set out to try and build a new type of publishing software that would make it easier to build and maintain dynamic websites. After a year of work we decided that a prototype would be needed to test what we'd made thus far. And what better prototype for testing that than the good ol' Pinside, right?

Now as you may know, this site has always been quite static. We would do everything, and although our visitors were invited to participate, it was all too unclear how one could do just that. This new site should improve participation (well, we hope!) so first thing you should do after reading this is sign up (or log in with your existing Pinside.com account) and do all the new stuff we've built for you:

1. Fill out your profile
2. Upload a cool avatar
   
3. Tell us about your pin collection
4. Rate some machines
5. Write a story or two about your favourite pins.

more stuff will follow soon, but hey this is a start isn't it!