We want to thank the nearly 40 people who braved the nasty weather to join us last week for the inaugural DZone VIP Meetup at our Cary, NC headquarters.  We hope you had a great time!  We certainly did.

The overwhelming consensus from attendees was that we should organize another event soon, and we told them to count on it.  Just take a look at the gallery of photos below and you’ll see that DZone sure knows how to throw a party! (Notice the Disco Ball?)

At the end of the night, everyone was sent home with a little DZone care package filled with our finest swag: Refcardz, stickers, magnets, and our custom-made DZone Meetup T-shirts.

Like we said in the initial meetup announcement, there was no presentation or topic focus for the meeing.  Just a great group of tech professionals kickin’ back with some beer and pizza, talking about technology, and making connections.  “Making connections” is our mantra for the DZone VIP Meetups and it’s an important theme for our company.  We take pride in being a facilitator of developer interaction so that intelligent tech professionals can share ideas and gain insight into new ways of thinking.

So why not have a great DZone event in your hometown?  Go to the DZone VIP Meetup page and start one now!  And please don’t hesitate to reach out to the DZone team to help you spread the word, provide funds, or send swag.

It’s time to mobilize! Please help us get DZone VIP meetups off the ground by starting or attending a DZone meetup where you live. Let’s get tech professionals and  together for good conversation and refreshments, and DZone will be glad to help out with free goodies like t-shirts, DZone Refcardz and books for door prizes as well as promotion and sponsorship assistance for refreshments.

Undoubtedly, most DZone members have been to a user group for one thing or another, but I’ve always wanted to have a get-together that was technically unbiased and more broadly open to people who simply share a passion for technology. Good things come from making connections with others whose skillsets and interests are slightly different from your own – it’s a technology version of “diversity is good!” It doesn’t matter if I carry an Apple laptop, I still think Windows and Linux machines are cool, too. Maybe I dig Java, but I’m certainly intrigued to know more about Python, Ruby and Scala. Let’s mix it all up and see what happens.

We’re not going to waste any time. The very first DZone VIP meetup will be at DZone HQ next Wednesday evening at 6:30PM, and I hope it becomes a regular ongoing event that attracts interesting folks in the NC Research Triangle for good conversation and outstanding beer and pizza! Mellow Mushroom, one of the best pizza joints in the area, just opened literally next-door to our new offices, so we figure it is time to get this party started. It is free, of course, and even if the first one is small it will certainly be interesting and fun. If you’re anywhere near Raleigh/Cary, then please join us.

It’s also exciting that DZone VIP meetups can happen all over the world! Already in less than 12 hours people have signed up to have DZone VIP meet ups in India, Sri Lanka, Bulgaria and the Philippines! We’re gratefully humbled by the global support and super-excited to help these pioneers get things off to a strong start. DZone will help you however we can – you’ve got a partner in the DZone team.

So, please think about getting involved. If there’s already a DZone VIP meetup near where you live, then please RSVP and show up for a good time. If not, then why not get one started? You’ll definitely get to meet some great folks and have a chance to hang out with others in a place where being a technology developer is what it’s all about. More is better – we’ll see you there!

Have you ever clicked on a DZone link from your feed reader and found that you had to go to some aggravating page at DZone and then click again to get to the link you actually wanted to visit in the first place?

Well, you won’t ever have to again!

I’ve been on a tear lately at DZone trying to focus intensely on what will work best for you guys, our awesome users. Matt and I have thought it over very carefully, and we want DZone to get you where you want to go as fast as we possibly can with a minimal amount of obstruction. In that spirit, despite the fact that it will cost us hundreds of thousands of traffic page views per month, we are eliminating this mandatory stop at DZone on your way to your desired destination.

Now, some of you will still bitch and moan about the “zone bar” we place at the top of the destination pages. Spare us – we know all about why everyone hates frames yada, yada, yada. Just login to DZone and turn it off in your user preferences. It’s really that simple, and we aren’t going to turn it off by default for everyone. After all, DZone is a business, and we’re serving you in hopes that we can earn enough to pay rent and feed our children.

So, there should be two positive outcomes from this major change at DZone. First, you’ll get to that link faster. Second, if you post links on our system, then more visitors will reach you from DZone. It’s a win-win for everyone, and we hope you know how important user satisfaction really is to all of us here on the DZone team.

More changes like this are in the works. Thank you for your continued support, and stay tuned.

PS – If anyone knows a technique that would let us frame-bust our own frame when you leave the DZone framed page, please let us know. We’d love to limit the potential downside of the target page framing, but we also need some of you to take a second to vote and/or comment from the DZone zone bar. If the zone bar and accompanying frame would disappear as soon as you exit the target page, then it would be less of a pain.

Some folks here at DZone have recently focused on improvements to the parts of our site related to DZone Refcardz, the 150-strong series of professional technology cheat sheets we have published during the past few years. Refcardz are truly outstanding resources for developers, but until now we haven’t really presented them as effectively as we could.

I’m sorry to say that nobody apparently got a good screenshot of the “before” pages because the “after” pages are simply worlds better. I wish I could show you an A/B, side-by-side comparison. If I can find an old screenshot I’ll update the post so you can see what I mean.

Anyway, here are some of the key improvements:

• Dramatically simplified download process
• Significant improvements in visual clarity
• Full-text HTML content of the Refcardz (no registration required)
• Useful list of related DZone Refcardz
• Better, more prominent author and sponsor credits
• Easy access to Twitter, Facebook and Google+ sharing

The best thing of all, however, is that the streamlined download process just works the way you’d expect it to. You click “Download” and (if you’re logged in) the download begins and you get immediate Refcardz goodness. This is much better than our previous process where you’d click to request the Refcardz, then wait for an email with a personalized URL, then click that link. Don’t ask me why we did it that way – what were we thinking?

In short, the DZone Refcardz pages look better, are better organized, and they are easier to use. They get you what you want faster!

There are 150 DZone Refcardz available for free. They cover a wide range of interesting developer and technology topics. These are typically written by bestselling tech authors and topic experts, so they can save you a lot of time and money as you work to add new skills or brush up on your old ones. Millions have been downloaded (even with the borked download process) and over 200,000 people subscribe to them.

Our new Refcardz page design should make it a lot easier for you to explore them all and find the ones that are most relevant for you. Enjoy!

This is like the old tale of the cobbler’s kids who had no shoes. For over three years DZone has been producing our popular cheat sheet series, DZone Refcardz. They are really a success by almost any metric, with millions of them downloaded, a massive number of subscribers, a Who’s Who list of authors, and a topic range that is broader and deeper than any other technical quick reference series we know of. There are over 150 DZone Refcardz, and if you’re a developer there’s probably something in the series for you.

So, what is the “cobbler’s kid” part of the story? Well, until today, there was literally no way to get a list of all the DZone Refcardz on one page, and there was no convenient way to search for Refcardz that would match your interests. You can use Refcardz to learn about almost any tech topic, but apparently we needed one about how to provide a list of Refcardz.

Our new refcardz search!

Honestly, if you’re scratching your head about this, then that makes two of us. How could DZone have created the world’s largest series of professional technology cheat sheets and NOT provided a searchable list to help you find the ones you might want? I mean, it has been three years already. THREE YEARS!!!

Well, I’m pleased to say that this problem has been rectified. DZone’s “CPR Squad” (which stands for Court, Peter and Ross – the devs working on features like this) has cooked up a nice initial implementation of a searchable, sortable list to replace the lame list of 5-6 recent Refcardz that formerly occupied the Refcardz homepage. You can search the cards by any term/pattern in the title, description and author field, and you can also search by tags. It’s pretty handy, and I’m not kidding when I say I discovered DZone Refcardz I was interested in but had forgotten about.

Search our refcardz by title, author, description, or all three!

This is just an initial step, and there’s some excellent followup work planned to enhance this new list. For one thing, you’ll soon be able to click a checkbox next to the title of each card you want and then download them all in one fell swoop. If you’ve ever endured our overly complicated request/download process for Refcardz you will know how much of a benefit this will be. Speaking of that overly complicated process, it is about to go the way of the dodo bird. Logged-in users will click the download link and have a download start, just as they would expect it to!

The DZone CPR Squad knows the new searchable list is not yet perfectly implemented, so your comments ideas and feedback would be greatly appreciated. How can we make it as easy as possible for you to locate and download the DZone Refcardz that best match your personal interests?

Everyone on the DZone team understands that without our awesome audience we are NOTHING! If you guys leave, then we lose – it’s that simple.

So, we take it super-seriously when we hear from over a hundred of you that you’re sick and tired of the “Top 10 Ways to Blah-blah-blah” links that have been invading DZone’s front page like a summer kudzu invasion in a Carolina meadow. It seems like there’s nothing you can do to get rid of it.

Well, don’t lose hope. We’ve been thinking and talking about this problem almost constantly at DZone HQ, and we believe we’ve got an answer that should make you happy and deliver you a much more personalized and useful DZone.

The solution was basically staring us in the face the whole time! If you don’t like a link then you should be able to just f**kin kill it without compunction. Our current “down vote” mechanism operates just like real-world politics – you vote, but it never seems to change anything! We’re sincerely sorry for causing you this frustration, and we’re going to give you a tool that let’s you see immediate results – the KILL button!

Once we get this implemented it’ll basically work like this. When you see a link you don’t like you can click the “Kill” button and choose to kill just that particular link, or all links with the same tags, or all links from the same domain or all links posted by the person who posted that link. If you don’t want to see any more links about “SEO” or links from “CrappyBlog.com” or posted by the user “SmarmyGuy” then you’ll be able to slay them with a single click. Even better, the unwanted links will disappear before your very eyes, immediately.

We’re trying to make this a pleasant and creative, too. We hope to publish an animation API for creative “DZone link kill” animations, and we’ll send a nice DZone swag pack to anyone who submits a kill plugin we end up using. Imagine, you click kill, and the Grim Reaper comes out with his scythe and cuts it out of the page, or it just explodes, or it fizzles into a cloud and evaporates. Of course, if you’re the type that doesn’t want any time-wasting amusements, you will be able to turn these off. Don’t like the creative kill animations, then just f**kin kill them, too!

So, we’re asking for comments about this idea. Will the kill button help alleviate the pain of seeing miserable links such as “101 Idiotic Things to Do On Your Blog!” and “Top 10 Ways to Bore Yourself To Death.” We hope it will. What do you say?

We moved into our new offices a couple weeks ago, and thought we’d share some pics.

Suggestions for decor are always welcome,  as we’re still searching for the perfect finishing touches to complete our humble Dorktopia.

Let us know! And if you’re in the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill, NC area, come on by! We’d be happy to show you around and shower you with as many Refcardz as you desire.

Greetings, DZone users.

We’re usually focused on delivering developer and IT related content in a variety of forms. That’s our calling card, and thanks to our users, we’ve been able to create a large, loyal, knowledge-soaked community around it.

But it recently occurred to us that we’re somewhat faceless. We supply loads of links, news, Refcardz and source code, but no one knows much more about us beyond the DZone logo. The general anonymity thing would be fine if DZone consisted of one lonely, bathrobe-clad soul trapped in his/her parent’s basement, but we’re a growing company.

We’ve got a gorgeous new office, a development team laser-focused on creating a great experiences for end users, curators that know how to separate the wheat from the chaff, and plenty of open ears.

We’re hungry for interaction, and don’t want our community thinking that DZone is a one-way street. Talk to us. We want to know what’s working for you, what you hate, and what you want to see. Please, don’t hold back. We’re pretty thick-skinned.

So we’ll use this space to share our ideas with you. We’ll tell you what we’ve got planned for DZone, and you can tell us what you think.

Isn’t that how the Internet is supposed to work?

Stay tuned.