About our new look!
warned26 March 2008, 1:29 PM
Welcome to the new APCmag.com! It’s finally here – after about 18 months of planning and development, we’re pleased to launch a site that incorporates many of your requests.
Some of the new features:
- Live discussion forums – your posts go straight online, for rapid-fire chat, not slowed-down by moderation. (Posts are still subjected to automated spam filtering and some posts will be bumped to a manual moderation queue if they look like they may breach our comment guidelines.)
- A huge review section – we heard you loud and clear: you read APC because we independently test the stuff you’re going to be laying down your hard earned cash on. So now, reviews will go live to our website first, with a much broader scope than we could cover in the magazine, thanks to the fact that we’re not limited by page space online.
- Email alerts and RSS everywhere – now you can subscribe to any part of APCmag.com through an RSS reader, or register to get email alerts as new content is published. It’s right throughout the site – not just a front-page article feed. For example, you can subscribe to all the posts written by a certain user. Or you can subscribe to a feed of stories only about ultraportable notebooks. Or you can subscribe to all comments posted in a certain discussion thread.
- Equal focus on reader contributions – you can now upload a picture and information about yourself into your user profile. We totally realise that the community is what make a tech website hum (and differentiates it from every other anonymous blog site out there.) This is, of course, just the beginning of our social networking features. We’re not aiming to become a competitor to Facebook, but on the other hand, we think there’s a lot we can do to bring together the Australian tech community.
- Popular content – we have lists of the most popular articles, forum threads and user comments all over the site to make it easy to discover stuff other readers have found interesting. With thousands of articles on the site, we realise it was getting harder on our old site to find older but still interesting articles.
- Easy submit to news aggregators – we read Digg and Slashdot every day and want to make it as easy as possible for you to submit items of interest. So, Digg and Slashdot submit links are everywhere – right down to individual comments in forum threads.And this is just the beginning… we have an extensive blueprint for the site that will add many more major sections and features.
What about bugs?
This site isn’t based on any off-the-shelf software – it has been mostly built from scratch, so although we’ve had a long beta test we do expect there are still bugs left in the code. (Our development team is still working fast and furiously on fixing the list of bugs we know about, and we think we’ve squashed all the ones that affect site use day-to-day).
If you do find bugs, we definitely want to hear about them so we can fix them and keep the community up-to-date on what’s happening with them. See our “how to report bugs” forum thread.
Got suggestions?
We’re also keen to hear your feedback on the new site and what features you’d like to see implemented. Please feel free to email the APC team, any time. The site editor is Dan Warne – dwarne@acpmagazines.com.au.
If you have a specific problem with the website that you don’t want to post in the forums, it’s better to email apcwebproblem@acpmagazines.com.au as that is our workflow-managed mailbox for bugs (it forwards straight through to Dan as well as key APC dev team and management people).
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