h4x   The useless ramblings of a web developer.

I noticed something odd this morning; no, actually I noticed it a while ago but I’ve just decided to share it. People that read bit-tech don’t seem to use their browsers print button. Instead they really like using the ‘Print’ link we’ve put on the page from AddThis.com.

AddThis email me statistics periodically and every time the ‘Print’ link is the most popular, by a huge margin, and it’s not even the first option on the page. I wonder what people did before we added the print link on article pages!

Just a quick note to say that we have launched the bit-tech blog.

It’s been custom written for the site and is quite neatly tied into the CMS and overall site.

It’s the end of an era really.

Since I can remember I’ve been a core part of bit-tech. I joined the website when Koolvin, Moose, RTT and myself looked after the site featuring Koolvins mods and a few guides and reviews. The team behind the site has evolved from the core and the site formed a company in 2005. I developed the current site and CMS over a year ago and it’s been evolving ever since.

bit-tech moved into new premises in April this year and now the company has been sold to Dennis Publishing. I am no longer a shareholder and at some point in the future we shall be moving to the Dennis headquaters in London

I will be integrating with the Dennis development team over the next six months and hopefully the site will see some positive moves forward.

I’ve just completed a move to new hosting on www.bit-tech.net. The site was previously hosted in Texas, USA but since we all work in the UK we’ve moved the site to servers just down the road from the office. The powerful quad core servers are also structured slightly differently than the previous setup. Instead of having separate apache/php web servers for the forums and site we now have one powerful apache/php server running the site, forums and shopping with a separate lighttpd server for images. The hope is that dynamic pages will still load promptly whilst we’re getting dugg or slashdotted as previously the apache connections were being blocked up with image downloads.

I’ve also moved my blog and hosting for h4x.co.uk to the same UK hosting company and I’ve just updated my wordpress install to the latest version which is very fancy.

Not only that but we’ve also moved offices. Since TrustedReviews was acquired by IPC media bit-tech has found new offices and we moved in on Monday 1st April 2008. You will find images and words on the topic here.

That’s all for now!

Price comparison seems to be a popular web exercise these days. There are so many people doing it that you almost can’t google a product name without seeing at least 5 different comparison sites.

At bit-tech.net we are no different, we have our own price comparison site built from the PriceGrabber API.

I am currently overhauling the code and look and feel of the site since it looks like ass. Stay tuned for the news when it’s released later this month.