Welcome to the brand new techAU, all grown up with a brand new domain name, we’re very excited about our new destination at the new .com.au domain. You’ll notice that there’s a brand new theme here, we’re kind of in love with it. It does a great job of exposing our great content across the site, rather than just the latest posts. The 3 column design provides easy and convenient access to common features used by our readers. Naturally the new design is mobile responsive and should look great on every device, from a mobile phone, right up to a HDTV.
The new site is much more than just a fresh coat of paint, there’s some new awesome new functionality on offer. We now let you subscribe to techAU via email subscription, and we’re also going to have weekly polls to get your feedback on the big tech questions.
Now for the big announcement..
Turning it up to 11 !
It’s time to accelerate the growth of techAU and we need your help to do that. Our current team of writers do an amazing job of covering the technology news from Australia and around the globe, but we think we can do even better. I’m very happy to announce that we’re opening the doors so that anyone can write articles for techAU!
Yep, that’s right, when you registration for the site now, the default role is now a contributor, instead of simply a subscriber. This means you get to submit articles and have your name on the post, putting your content and profile in front of the growing techAU audience. If you’re wondering how big the techAU audience is, we regularly attract between 20 and 30,000 unique visitors per month and use around 60GB of bandwidth. If you’re still on the fence, know this. Those writers that regularly post great quality will be offered opportunities like attending press events or offered product review opportunities. While anyone can start a new site today, leveraging an established site that has been online for more than 7.5 years is an amazing opportunity.
Post will need to go through an approval process, be we expect a high percentage of the posts to reach the front page. To get started, just visit http://signup.techAU.com.au (also available from the menu), verify your email and get writing! You can access the member’s module from the footer on every page. When logged in, remember to complete your profile including your social accounts, as we will be surfacing those links on any articles you write.
techAU has a very established social following and when your post goes live, it will be posted to twitter from the @techAU account, as well as our Facebook page and other networks.
New Infrastructure
The new domain might be proudly Australian, but behind the scenes things are a little different. First up was the domain name, it’s registered with VentraIP who reached out to me on Twitter and have been a pleasure to deal with. After suffering downtime with our previous host AustDomains, owned by CrazyDomains (do NOT use either of them), techAU has now moved to a brand new back end. The site now runs on Windows Azure. Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure Azure is an seriously powerful and easy platform to use. After venting my hosting frustrations online, I got plenty of recommendations, but many weren’t suitable. One of my key criteria was reliability, of which Azure has a great record.
One of the biggest criticisms of Azure is its cost, and that’s something I’ll be watching closely over the coming months, what I will say is the costs of using Azure has reduced considerable since it first launched. The Azure team have one of the most rapid update schedules anywhere in the company. So far, my experience has been great, but knowing the interest this move will attract, I’ll be sure to keep you updated.
