About time that I finally open up GameSnips.com for some beta testing.  I'm only announcing this on yankidank.com right now because I need to still finish some parts of the site and test for bugs.  The site is not what I was hoping for just yet, but it's still kick ass.  If you like Digg and video games, this site WILL be your new homepage.  There are still some spots that need to be fixed, right now the forum userlist is seperate from the main site users so you have to register for each part seperately.  Eventually it will only require one log on for the whole site, but that probably won't happen for a little while.  Let me know what you think on the GameSnips forum and start posting and voting for some articles.  Right now voting is open to anyone, so you don't even have to sign up for an account just yet.  But if you do sign up for an account you'll be eligible for prizes down the road and you will be able to keep track of stories that you've voted and commented on through your profile.

Starting today EVERY Yankidank.com member from yesterday morning all the way back to the very first day Yankidank.com came online, will have an opportunity to become part of the next big thing in video game news. Well, I really can't recall a first big thing in game news so I suppose this might be it. If you are a fan of Digg.com, but not a fan of their categories and n00b users, you have to try out GameSnips.com. GameSnips offers many of the same features as Digg, only with a gaming twist. All news is game news, and all news is fresh and user submitted.

The great news is that signing up at GameSnips has already been done for you if you are a current member of Yankidank.com. To log into your GameSnips account you will first have to request a confirmation code for your username though to verify your email is still valid (don't worry, we don't spam) this password confirmation email is needed to activate your account. As you can see user accounts are already set up at GameSnips based on Yankidank.com user accounts. If you have a Yankidank account current as of this morning, check out these example urls replacing the username with your own to see your profile

• http://www.gamesnips.com/user.php?login=Yankidank
• http://www.gamesnips.com/user.php?login=Fiveandseven
  
• http://www.gamesnips.com/user.php?login=Moonreaver

When you view a sample profile using the link above it might display that you joined on: 1969-12-31. This should update to the accurate date after you have logged in to your account for the first time.

After entering in the confirmation code given to you via email you can log in to your account with your yankidank.com username and the password, "password". Be sure to immediately change your password once you have logged in for the first time if you use your yankidank.com account to sign up. This will prevent others from stealing your account. You can get started right away by submitting stories, and with each story you submit that makes it to the front page your "karma" goes up. What does this mean? Well, karma sort of works as influence on GameSnips. The higher your karma, the faster your stories will be promoted. We are working on adding extra features down the road to encourage higher karma. For now I'm just going to let everyone know that the higher their karma, the better it will be for them in the future.

Today we celebrate our first birthday at Yankidank.com. Take a moment to tell us happy birthday on the forums, or by commenting on this story. We will be releasing the 30th episode of Gamer's Radiocast tomorrow, since the true birthday is at 11:30 p.m. tonight.

If you would like to support the site, please make a small donation to help pay for the web server costs and for future prizes. Keep the site advertisement free!

Gamer's NewsCast 2.0. 15 minutes of the most recent articles from Yankidank.com as read by the sexiest voice in podcasting. I didn't feel very comfortable with the first episode of this new style show, but I'll ease up in future episodes. PLEASE let me know what you think of it by emailing me at GamersRadio@gmail.com , and tell me what sort of things you want to hear on future episodes.

Articles in today's show:

Today was a really big day at Yankidank.com. We have added 3 new features today to the site that I think are all really great. The first feature is the new ability to private message other Yankidank.com members. You can quickly and easilly access your message center by using the "Private Messages" block to the left of each page. When you don't have any messages in your inbox it will display the message " There are no incoming messages. Create". If you do have a private message it will display how many new and used messages are in your inbox in that area.

The second feature I added today was a web based Javascript HTML WYSIWYG editor for writing stories. As Tux, Senior Editor of Yankidank.com, said in the forums "this makes submitting stories 10x easier". The old method of posting stories took a lot of HTML knowledge to post links, images, and format. The new method makes it much easier for someone to just copy/paste a story from it's source page. You can now copy/paste articles from sites and it will preserve much of the data copied. Don't be too confident though about how well it can copy and paste, you should as always preview your stories before submitting them and double check the links. Since it is now so simple to place links into articles we now REQUIRE that you post a link to the original article when quoting the source domain in all capitals. Please familiarize yourself with the new posting rule.To learn more about the software used to power this features, see TinyMCE.

The final update for the site is just as useful as the other two, but won't be put to full use until the page changes servers. We have installed a new download area for the site where you can download files from the site. There is only one file sitting in this area right now, but I will start posting many more downloads such as the podcasts and video episodes in the near future. You have to be logged in to see the downloads. Since Yankidank.com is becoming a little too popular I don't want to offer too many files and go over my bandwidth for this month. Currently I have a plan for only 60 GB of bandwidth and 1,600 MB storage per month on the Yankidank.com server. I plan to move the site to another server soon that will offer somewhere around 260 GB of bandwidth and at least 5 GB of storage space. If anyone is wondering, the new server (who I love) is Dreamhost. When I make the server switch I will enable user uploads to the download section, but until then it will be restricted to what I upload.