hmm... when you think about it, this is codenewbie, not "here is your news for nerds" forum, if we were to provide news on the frontpage, I would rather go with it beeing programming/coding related news.. (with the occationaly nerdy stuff) not featuring every item from /. for that theres /. and people know it exist.
I would rather do a complete change of the frontpage, and have it showing some information regarding codenewbie, like the latest 10 started threads, or for us regulars the 10 latest replies to threads, I know I love that feature from other forums I attend to.
It could be spiced up with the latest blogs and some statistics, like the top 10 posters determined on their average post per day, statistics of visitors from google what their search terms were to send them here, statistics on threads viewed the most, posted the most etc..
Giving it more a use for this forums users instead of just an eye catcher..
I know we used to have alot of this previusly, but as far as I recall we never did any further investigation on gathering all the info and making it all available on the frontpage..
Mike, I think you get my thoughts from this description, eventho it was rather mangled together.
Note: Only requirement I have, is that it isn't as filled like the stuff on
www.tinyminds.org, since I find that frontpage too stuffed and heavy.