We’ve got some pretty big internal structural changes happening to the ZATZ Web sites this weekend. All our pages are going from static generation to dynamic. What that means is, previously, we individually generated (what we called “rendering”) pages once to an Apache server, which would then serve each pre-generated page to you when you visited any of the magazines. Unfortunately, making a simple change, like changing the copyright date from 2004 to 2005, necessitates regenerating well over 20,000 individual pages. In addition, it’s much more difficult to include dynamic data, like we’re trying to do as we add more interactive services and RSS support.

So, this weekend, we’re making the move from static serving to serving the pages dynamically from our ZENPRESS server. We’ve tested most of the changes offline and have been working on developing the new system for the past few months, but since we’re moving pretty much everything, there may be some down-time and weirdness. We figured the New Year’s weekend was good for such a change because many of you will be away from your ‘puters, but don’t freak if things seem weird (OK, weirder than usual) for the next few days. This transition’s a pretty big job.

Oh, and to everyone, a Happy New Year and our fervent hope for all your safety and the safety of those you love. Best wishes to everyone from us here at ZATZ!