We're happy to announce the availability of a much-requested feature: email alerts. Now, members can elect to receive updates, conveniently delivered to their email addresses, of activities related to their Thotswap accounts.

Examples of activities that can trigger alerts include someone leaving a comment on your public profile or on one of your blog posts or reviews, or someone becoming a fan of you. All of these alerts can, of course, be modified by every member. As a convenience, we've turned them on for you, so if you want to disable some or all of the alerts, you can do so from within a new panel in your Dashboard.

Due to the release of Internet Explorer 8 today, we have been hard at work testing and making sure Thotswap works properly under this new browser. We have already identified a few minor rendering issues with our website, but if you see other problems with the way our website appears under IE8, please let us know.

There was one greater issue with Internet Explorer 8 that caused some of the functionality of our website to break. This would occur through the use of functions like rating someone's entry or retrieving a user information tooltip, and would result in an undefined error. We've since corrected this problem, but some of you may have cached files on your computer, which don't contain the fixes we implemented. If you see this error, simply force-refresh the webpage and the problem should disappear.

We had some issues with our database server last night after our web host decided to perform maintenance and upgrades on our server. We've managed to restore the database to a working state, but unfortunately there is now some data that is missing because we had to restore an older snapshot of the database from earlier last night.

We're aware that at least one user is affected by this and will probably be unable to log into his or her account because the account was created after the server went down for maintenance. In addition, any activities on the website such as posting comments or creating and updating reviews and blog posts performed late last night (or early this morning) will not be present on the website.

First and foremost, you'll notice that we've renamed the Private Profile (or often referred to as the Profile for short) of past to the much more cleaner Dashboard. This is a move we feel will reduce confusion, as every member now has both a Dashboard, which is accessible by that member only, and a public profile, which is accessible by everyone else. From this point on, the Dashboard will now be the home of information and controls that can be used to monitor and modify every aspect of your account.

Secondly, we'd like to introduce you to a new feature we added today: favorite links. Do you have a favorite website or blog that you would like to share with your friends and visitors? Now, you can add a list of favorite links to your public profile for everyone to see -- like a blogroll for those of you familiar with blogging terminology. You can manage your list of favorite links right from within the Dashboard, under the "Profile" tab:

If you are a member of AdSense, you may have received an email from Google last week about their new interest-based advertising. The email message contains the following paragraph:

As a result of this announcement, your privacy policy will now need to reflect the use of interest-based advertising. Please review the information at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100557 to ensure that your site's privacy policies are up-to-date, and make any necessary changes by April 8, 2009. Because publisher sites and laws vary across countries, we're unfortunately unable to suggest specific privacy policy language.

Today, we're excited to announce an important update to the Thotswap website. As of this evening, all current and future members will have their own domain name underneath thotswap.com to call their own!

When you create an account, you will now be automatically given the URL http://yourname.thotswap.com, where visitors can find your public homepage. Additionally, all your blog posts will also be published under this domain.

Here's a short summary of some of the changes we introduced this weekend.

First and foremost, we modified our homepage a bit and moved some stuff around to put more of an emphasis on user content. You'll notice that we've moved the Latest in Blogs box to the main section, giving it a more front and center appearance. We also introduced a Last Commented On box to give visitors a heads-up on the conversations that are going on around the community.

Today, we're proud to introduce you to the Thotswap Referral Program. A key component of our long-term growth strategy, the Thotswap Referral Program rewards you for telling your friends about Thotswap and getting them to join in and participate in our growing community.

By getting your friends to join as your referrals, you receive up to an additional 20% of the total advertisement impressions your referrals generate! That means that you can potentially earn a bonus continuous stream of cash just from your referrals on top of what you can earn from your own Thotswap activities!

Over the weekend, we made a small addition to Thotswap: support for social bookmarking on all Thotswap blog posts and reviews. Now, if you're a member of Digg, Delicious, Facebook, or any of the other services that we've added support for over the weekend, you can quickly share or give recognition to blog posts and reviews that you like.

You can see these social bookmarking links at the bottom of every blog post or review.

One of the most sought-after features since we first asked people to try out our website back in November was the ability to insert images directly into a review or blog post. Because of this, it's been one of the main features that we've been working on the past few months, and, as of a few days ago, you can now easily insert images into your reviews and blog posts!

If you haven't noticed it before...If you're curious to try it out, just create a new blog post or review (or edit an existing one) and you'll notice a new "Insert/Edit Image" button within the main editor (you don't need to publish your entry in order to try this out).