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.

One of the things we heard a lot over the years was that nobody seemed to know who where actually behind the Pinside and what made them tick. That's why we decided to make things a bit more clear for you guys. And this blog is one of the first outings of this intension. We think it will be nice if we share more of our plans and expectations for this site with you. And tell you some more about the way we experience pinball ourselves. And what better way to do this than in the form of a blog, right? Well, I hope it will appeal to you.

Let me start by telling you some things about myself, as this seems to be a good way to start. My name is Martijn and I am 32 years of age. I live in Alkmaar, a Dutch town about 40 miles to the north of Amsterdam and I live there with my girlfriend Sanne and our cat Pesto. I studied computer science combined with economics, and I have a background in programming and databases. My brother Robin and I have been creating games and applications together every since we were kids. He always working on the design and I more on the code itself. So that we'd team up to create the Pinside was only a matter of time.

My hobbies? Besides pinball I love everything that has to do with sports, music, computers, programming, games and all that. If you're about my age you will know what this means: growing up with disco, Commodore 64, Amiga, BBS, Atari, Arcades, Monkey Island and Sid Meier Games. I absolutely love that kind of stuff. Heck, I can talk hours about it. But as this is a site about pinball let's concentrate on that for now.

So besides the looks, what's new? We tried to make everything more transparent and user friendly, so we added help pages to explain certain features (not totally finished yet) and a way to contact us. We also added a thing called 'My Pinside' that is basically a personal section for every Pinside user. You can use this section to manage the things you do on the Pinside and to share information about yourself with others. For instance you can add yourself to the 'World Pinball Map', manage your machines by using the 'Collection Manager'  or tell other people a bit about yourself by writing a background story or by filling out your 'Profile'. All these things will show up in the 'Community' section and using 'PinsideMail' this might help you locate and contact other pinball loving people. In addition to this we also expanded the machine archive. Besides all the stuff that was already there we added machine stories, machine video's, machine owner's and the machine market. Want to know what this all means? Go check out the archive for yourself!

All in all we think we added a lot of interesting new things to the Pinside and we hope that you will find good usage for them. We spent 4 months developing the new layout and features, so now we first want to see how you guys receive this new design before carrying on. After all, nobody likes to create stuff that isn't used anyway, right?

So what are our new plans for the site? Well, that's for a future blog to write about. For now go explore the site and tell us what you think of it by leaving us a reaction or sending us a message. I am sure you will like what you see!

Have fun!
Martijn