Eventually, we're going to find another section of the site where I can post updates to readers answering questions, providing fixes to problems, responding to suggestions for improving the site and so forth.  For the moment, my apologies to my Coffee House colleagues for the intrusion.  If you're a reader and have questions on any of these points, please follow me through the "Continue Reading Here" link and we'll discuss.

All told, we had a pretty successful launch yesterday from a technical perspective.  We actually had a bigger audience than we expected. That caused a brief outage in the late morning.  And then we had to take the site offline briefly in the early afternoon to upgrade the server to deal with the high traffic.

Now, the one problem we're still dealing with is that a number of you are having various problems registering.  If you're still having a problem, drop us a line at our bug report email address which you can find in the "contact us" section linked up at the left.  We'll try to deal with the specific problem you're having.

Basically, we really appreciate the trouble you're going to to try to visit and make use of the site and we're doing everything we can to help.  So drop us a line if you're having a problem.  And we're doing everything we can simultaneously to iron out whatever underlying glitches there may causing these problems.  Hopefully later today or tomorrow we'll post an FAQ or short post detailing some specific steps you can take if you're having problems.

Next, it's become immediately clear that we need a section of the site set aside for taking your suggestions about how to improve the site.  So we're going to set up a discussion table devoted to this issue.  That way we can here what people think and ways we can improve the site and we can also get a sense of whether there's a consensus in favor of certain changes.  So look forward to that.

Another question: RSS Feeds.  Yes, we're going to have all sorts of RSS feeds, sliced and diced in various ways.  In fact, most of them are already set up.  There just not visible enough yet.  So we're working on that.  And expect to hear more from us shortly.

Another point. A few readers have said the text on the site is too small.  We're looking into making text size an option you can customize for yourself in "My Preferences".  But for the moment, in most case these comments come from users of Microsoft IE who have their text setting set to "smaller".  To change that, go to View > Text Size and change the setting to medium.

Another point.  Some of you have noticed that there are little shards of html coding showing up in your comments or your submissions to the discussion areas.  The root issue here is that we've set up the default input to be a WYSIWYG html editor.  What that means is that it works like Microsoft Word where all the coding is invisible and you just see the results.  So for instance you don't type in <b>bold</b> to make something bold you just highlight and use the button below.

If you go ahead and put in the html tags they just show up in the text.  Also, if you cut and paste text from some programs that will make tags show up too.  If you're more comfortable just using a straight text editor and doing the html manually, you can switch to that.

Just go to "My Preferences" in MyTPMCafe.  Then click interface.  Whe you get to that page, uncheck WYSIWYG and change the pull down menu from html formatted to "Auto Format".  Then you don't have to bother with the editor.

The last point is related to this one.  A number of folks have asked why there aren't nested comments and various other features for the site.

In most cases, the answer is there soon will be.

Let me explain though the thinking that went in to how I designed the site.  My sense was that there were many readers of TPM who had a basic sense of reading a blog but would be bewildered by all the various options involved in many discussion sites and have no idea what to make or want to deal with nested comments or threads and the like.  So at least at the start I tried to keep things as simple as possible.  However, I know that many readers find these features helpful and even essential.  So we'll be making most of these options available in short order.  As I said above, we'll be opening a feedback table shortly.  So it would be a great help to us if you could let us know the particular features that you'd most like added to the site, etc.