Erik asked:

"What are the pitfalls you mention to doing a 'new to you' widget? interested because i've been thinking along those same lines recently."

Thanks for asking! It's two things mostly: First is about how you cookie. If you always cookie with a simple permanent 'last visited' cookie each time they come, then if they follow a link and then come back, all the rest of their 'new' stuff is gone because you 'just visited.'

This necessitates two cookies. a 'true just visited' permanent cookie, and a placeholder cookie with a 5 (or 10, or 60) minute timeout that says 'before this session, they last came at such-and-such a time' and whenever they hit the home page, if that cookie exists, it gets renewed with that timestamp, so they don't 'reset' the new until 5 (or 10 or 60) minutes after the *last time* they hit the home page.

That's cool, nifty, and doable, but then what if you use more than one computer? What if you want to be able to share that cookie across several computers? Well, then you have to sign in in some fashion or another, and then Fury has to keep track of modtimes, so it can share them between computers. Without this it gets annoying to see things as 'new' when they aren't really, just new to that computer, and ends up being a detractor because it's giving misleading information.

That's what makes it so complicated. :-)