Version 2.2 of our podcasting and publishing engine brings a few new features, but it also loses one major one – our custom font. Ever since we started using this theme, I’ve hated that font. The only thing that stopped me from getting rid of it was that I didn’t know it was custom – it wasn’t nice and it looked weird, but I always assumed that it was part of the standard web-safe set. However, when I ran a site performance analysis earlier this morning, it appeared that there were three font files that were part of the custom font – and each was taking between ten and twenty seconds to load from fresh on a computer that had never loaded our site before. This was clearly a problem that needed to be fixed – we could not afford for our site’s loading time to take such a drastic hit. So, about two hours ago, our custom font was officially decommissioned and taken down. It has been replaced by what would have been its default fallback anyway should it have failed to load, which is Helvetica, with Arial on standby and then the default sans-serif on the user’s system.

Instantly, I started seeing a much bigger change. The site now took seven seconds to load completely, down from the previous fifteen or sixteen, and repeat views took merely two seconds. Browsers no longer have to download all three TrueType files (yes, we did use TrueType files and not Typekit or Google Web Fonts integration, a mistake of which I now feel I should be ashamed, but hey, I didn’t develop the theme) and render the font in the page. They can just use Helvetica to improve the loading time for the users (that’d be you).

Also new in HackIt 2.2 is system-wide menus – every time we want to roll out a new menu item we no longer have to access each site in turn and edit the menus. I can’t believe we didn’t do it sooner. On top of that, we can now instantly replicate site settings throughout the network – on SOPA/PIPA protest day (January 18th, 2012), we blacked out our entire network. And yes, we did go in by hand and set each individual site to Dark mode. However, that night, we had set up a new system that would allow us to set all our sites back to Light mode, which we used. It worked, and so we can now use it for all manner of configuration changes.

So, that’s it for HackIt 2.2′s release post. We’re already working on features for 2.3, but we hope that this release will make our site even better.

• Featured story – there’s a post at the top of the page now, which is the story we want you to see first. It’s either the latest news story of the day or our pick of the blogs.
• Today on HackIt TV – each day we will pick out the best of our video content and show it on our playlist.
• Latest Headlines – we aggregate all the posts from our News site and show them all in a convenient list just there.
• Site news – this bit right here. The latest couple of posts from the lovely little blog telling you what we’re building next.

Enjoy the new setup!

This means that, when you enter a search term on any blog, all blogs in the network will be searched. The results page will show results from all blogs, and every search box has been activated for use with this feature.

You do not need to take any action to begin using HackIt Search – it has been enabled automatically for everyone.

If you wish, HackIt Search is also available as a separate web page at http://search.hackit.me.uk.

Enjoy!

The site news isn’t the most interesting of front page topics. Wouldn’t you prefer to have the latest videos, tech news and reviews pop up on the front of the site?

Well, that’s what we’re working on. It’ll show up right on the front door when it’s ready.

Oh, and you didn’t hear it from us.

HackIt had quite a long outage over the weekend, which rolled over onto Monday. We were installing BSD on our server. And now we’re back, and better than ever.

Our system will now run faster, fail less and we will operate more services as well.

Thank you for bearing with us, and we’re gonna keep this thing running as long as possible. We don’t need to reboot for patches, security updates, antivirus… it all just works and updates smoothly, and we’ll give you plenty of notice if anything changes.

Enjoy!

You can never have enough stuff, right? Well, we’ve started selling it. Now, we’ll admit it, it’s not cheap – one-off prints from these shirt companies never are. We only make a little kickback from each shirt. Honest. But even so, if you like HackIt enough, get some stuff!

We’ve got sleeves for your tablet or laptop, bags, hats, mugs, lanyards and more shirts than you can possibly imagine. You in? We thought so. Do you like stuff? Do you like HackIt? Enough said. Just click here or hit Stuff on the menu.

Thanks, though. Really. And enjoy your shirt.

You can sign up for a free account and access the forums as often as you like at http://forum.hackit.me.uk.

More categories will start opening soon for wider discussion.

Let the talking begin!

Enjoy!

We’ve just launched our first blog in the hackit 2.0 ecosystem – HackIt Top 5. On this site, you can see our top 5 favourite gadgets, games, apps and more. We’ve started with our top 5 business card scanning apps – and I’m sure you’ll agree that our number one is a well-deserved winner.

Anyway, check out the new site and see what you think!

–Chris

It’s finally here, the update everyone’s been waiting for – we have upgraded to hackit 2.0! The site is gone, the content is saved, the database is backed up and we are launching our new WordPress-powered blog network to make HackIt more interesting, easier to read, and open to a wider audience – you will soon be able to pick topical blogs based on the things you like to read about, you will be able to subscribe to them, and it will be quite a bit easier to get around the site, as opposed to the tangled mess I managed to drive the old site into.

Also, we’re opening for more bloggers – with the new blogs, we’ll need a larger team to manage the thing and put posts in, so I will be finding more people to post to the blogs. At the moment, there’s nothing open for my readers – but soon enough, you may be able to apply for or even win your spot in being a HackIt blogger on one of the blogs that will appear on this network.

We’re making more of a community here – welcome to 2.0!

–Chris, HackIt founder