As we've written about before we ask you to tell us everything you wish DotNest would do differently. The DotNest developer survey is still on, but not for long: We'll close it on the 23rd. If you haven't filled it out here's the time, because you may also win a year of custom domain usage!

Just fill out the survey and you'll take part in the draw*. We'll raffle off three full-year custom domain usage prizes (worth USD 66) and let you know in an e-mail whether you've won! (Just be sure to supply your e-mail address on the form.) If you've already filled out the survey don't worry, you're eligible to win as well of course. (*Lombiq team members and their family members may not take part in the draw.)

So tell us your thoughts in the survey, enjoy an improved DotNest and win!

The GPU Day conference series organized by the Wigner Research Centre for Physics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences is dedicated to the fields of parallel and high-performance computing, visualization and data analysis in scientific and industrial applications. On the last three conferences Lombiq presented its cutting edge technology, called Hastlayer. The conference site was developed by Gábor Domonkos from Lombiq here on DotNest which is a great proof of how far you can get using only the built-in DotNest features and Media Theme for theming.

DotNest has been around for a while (4 years to be exact) and has changed a lot. We at Lombiq listened to your continuous ad-hoc feedback and improved the service where we could. This time we ask you to tell your opinion directly: What would you change to make DotNest the best developer-focused Orchard hosting platform? We've prepared a five-minute survey and it would be awesome if you could fill it out! Click here to see it, and if you tell us your e-mail address we'll address your feedback in a reply too. Thanks in advance!

As you've surely noticed now, also from the barrage of privacy policy updates you should've received, in the EU the GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation, takes effect today. This greatly enhances how your personal data should be protected by companies, but if you're a company, you also need to make sure you comply with it (if you manage EU citizens' data then you should, even if your company is not incorporated in the EU).

You may have heard of Show Orchard, but only if you've been in the Orchard CMS community for a longer time: Show Orchard is a showcase for great Orchard websites, but has been down for the better part of the last year.

Now it's back online, but as a DotNest site, with a Media Theme, and maintained by Lombiq. Check it out for some of the nicest Orchard websites and if you know one that's not listed send it to guys at showorchard.com!

Also, a case study is coming!

We've talked about this idea within Lombiq for quite a while and it's finally here! The DotNest SDK is the easiest way for developing themes for DotNest sites before deploying them as a Media Theme. It contains the same Orchard code base and all the open-source modules and themes on top of that as what's running on DotNest, so you can run your site locally with confidence that it's going to behave almost exactly the same as the live one. We also have a nice developer story with automatic updates from the SDK to your repository to make sure that you're able to work the latest code (make sure to read the Readme!). The DotNest SDK is available as a Git repository on GitHub and as a Mercurial repository on Bitbucket with continuous bi-directional synchronization powered by Git-Hg Mirror, another awesome Lombiq project.

Most of the time you don't just want to have a website standing alone but you also want to hook it up with other services, social media integrations being the most basic example. Now we added the Feed Aggregator module to give you more options: It allows you to automatically sync content from RSS and Atom feeds to your DotNest site. So if you want to import content from other blogs, embed images from a remote image gallery or list videos from a YouTube channel, now you can do this easily.

There are a lot of modules available on DotNest, but not that many themes to style your sites. You asked for more, and we listened: the Basic Blog Theme by Márk Bartha is now available for all DotNest sites!