We are moving TechCrunch over to a dedicated server tonight. Things didn’t go as smoothly as possible, and the site is down now. Probably will be for another few hours. The nice thing is that when it is back up, I’ll have all the bandwidth and CPU cycles I need to handle the modest traffic.

There is a very talented engineer helping me with the move as well as some new features. I’ll write more about the engineer later, but I want to describe some of the new stuff now, and your thoughts.

First, I’ve gotten a ton of requests for better search on TechCrunch. The standard wordpress search leaves a lot to be desired. Quite often I go to the search engines to find my own archived posts, for instance. I’m not improving on the search feature for now. But I am going to do two things. First, I’m going to redo the categories to be more useful (and go back and retag posts more appropriately). Second, and more importantly, we are building a self-creating index of all companies I’ve written about. If you want to see what I’ve written about a company, you’ll be able to go to this index and find it by looking it up alphabetically or searching. This will also auto-generate an opml file, of course.

Second, I need to find a better way to organize and respond to profile requests. Right now I link to my email address, and I’ve fallen so far behind that there is no way to catch up. Instead, I am going to add a quick web form that companies can fill out, giving me the relevant data in a structured way. The data will be private, but there will be an option (the company’s option) to allow me to share this data with venture capitalists and other service providers. Some companies really want this, others absolutely don’t. It will be their choice.

Third, and I’m really excited about this, I’ll be launching a new blog next week under a completely separate domain name, which will be written by a really great, established blogger. The topic will be tech-related and highly specific (and an area I don’t really cover enough). Over time I will be adding more blogs and more authors on relevant topics.

I’ll be giving more details on each of these items next week. For now, we’re just trying to get the site back up.