Welcome back - bit-tech!

But that would mean Kid's spammage would have been for nothing....

 

I meant the CMS rather than the forum...

Is that praise of the bit-tech cms, or damning criticism of the others? I was under the impression the bit-tech cms was a cobbled together barely working jury-rigged mess [hence the 'good luck with that...' comments about getting it working], if that's not the case then fair enough.

 

I thought the same, but we may be talking about different things. Are you referring to the site CMS or the now out of date vBulletin one with the heavily integrated elements for the site?

 

Jamie mentioned a long time ago that changes to the vBulletin version on this forum would be extremely hard because of the number of modifications which had been made to integrate it with the site and vice versa. I presume that won't change any time soon? If it's not broken and all that...

 

Of course you don't.
You pop it on a raspberry pi running in the loft of my house with my speedy rural broadband connection.

Servers are so last year!

In other news, I did notice a period of outage the other day. It was a bit odd and annoying but I lived.
Personally I'm happy to see that there is a new top cat, fresh blood brings a fresh perspective and fresh ideas, which is no bad thing sometimes.

To the Admins and the people doing the migration, you have my respect, it isn't easy to migrate servers, especially a beast this size, keep up the good work!

 

I can't believe you did not say anything about cheesecake!

• cheesecake is the only recognised food of the gods
• swimsuits on men are NOT allowed any more....

 

@ Combatus I see you finally got your name in red now lol

 

I can imagine that holds true for the majority of similar articles on other sites too. I tend not to read much of the stuff in between for things like GPU tests simply because they're copy/paste jobs with a new chart. The charts themselves I find you don't need to read either because you summarise the whole thing nicely in the conclusion. It's the same deal with case reviews, I'll read all the unboxing and exploring bits, then skip the thermal testing as I can find the same info in the conclusion.

In reality the middle pages there are more for spot links and fact checking than actual reading, say if you want to convince somebody that product X is 20% faster than product Y. Sadly though, without the middle pages, the rest doesn't mean much either from the perspective of thorough testing, they're mostly there to confirm your conclusions using data.

As for articles other than reviews, I read the whole thing start to finish usually.

 

Thanks for clarifying Anthony. The staff and accuracy of their reviews is one of the things that kept me coming back to Bit, I just miss the pre-Dennis epics that used to dominate the homepage back when Wil and then Tim were at the helm

Also, why not just put the whole article on one or two pages? Terrible for advertising no doubt, but brilliant for the reader. Force us to read your graphs, we know we want to

 

The cheesecake needs no mention, it goes without saying

[edit]

They removed the 'Cheesecake' word swap! When did that happen?! This is blasphemy!

 

I suppose it's more about picking your subject for the really big reviews. Articles on new silicon like Harry's epic 15 page review of the GTX 680 probably had a thorough reading by most - though I'm guessing Haswell didn't generate as much interest, as it quickly became clear it was going to be an incremental improvement on Ivy; which was an incremental improvement on Sandy.

Personally, I wouldn't invest as much time in reading a review on a monitor or a fan controller. Not that I'm suggesting you'd squander a dozen pages on something like that, but I'm sure you get my meaning. Nor would I care to read more than a few pages on the latest SSD, if testing only proves it to be marginally faster than the last batch. Reviews do have lasting appeal - I often trawl through old articles, fishing out comparisons and little titbits of information, months and even years afterwards.

Reviews aren't everything though.

Save the occasional flagship release, I'd much rather read three five page reviews than one fifteen page epic; if it meant you had more time for what, in my opinion, made bit tech great - feature articles. I think the last good example that springs to mind was the piece you did on USB 3.0.

On release day you can pick a dozen tech sites, and the only real way to differentiate, save their choice of benchmark software, is by preference of writing style. The features are what make the site stand out from the others, and bit tech has been lacking that for a long time.

I know it's down to belt tightening, and the number of hours in a day, but that has been the loss I've felt the most.

On a related matter, can I ask if the review index will be reinstated? The different hardware sections are missing. I assume it's on the to-do list?

 

Oh wait a minute, I wasn't awake when I posted that this morning The word swap is still there! I had it backwards - f t w gets changed to cheesecake, not the other way around

Cheesecake.

 

A unicorn crying wolf... whatever next?

jk Matt

 

Very very well put. I to go back to previous review for comparisons.
The reason why I joined in the beginning was because of the reviews that you guys did and obviously because of the miss that people did.

 

It's possibly the best CMS ever built. But old rails projects are more and more difficult to get working these days

You be wrong sir. very, very wrong

 

To echo Rich's comments, it was designed by Jamie with heavy input from the editorial team led by me at the time. Jamie conceptualized it to be completely modular so there was no longer a need to do a massive version overhaul, thus saving valuable dev time so we could focus on building new features quickly rather than having to start from scratch every time. I then worked with him to tweak it to iron out any annoying user interface issues. Had it not been neglected during the Dennis years, it's quite possible that it would be far advanced from [what I can imagine] it is currently.

It was also the first and only CMS I've used that was designed with the user right at the centre. It was just a pleasure to use and, it seems it still is today. It was also designed to be incredibly lean and to enable the site to run on a very small server infrastructure, without losing speed at very busy times.

Most of the other CMSes I've used were designed by a developer with very little regard for the people who use the platform day in, day out so whenever I got chance to use bit-tech's CMS, I always looked forward to it.

I asked for a feature, and Jamie made it happen. For example, some of our graphs leaked in the past which got us into trouble with a manufacturer, so I sat down with Jamie to figure out a way to build them into the webpage so that they couldn't leak (or be easily stolen) and so that the text was also searchable to further enhance SEO. We then took them further so that you could rebuild graphs for future reviews very quickly, further reducing the time spent putting articles together.

Time spent fighting a CMS is time that could be better spent running more benchmarks, or testing other comparison products.

I won't comment on the length of reviews beyond saying that I too miss the longer articles packed full of detail. The site was better for them. The same can be said in regard to features, but I know Ed and Simon were both under quite serious budget constraints, so something has to give in order to keep the business running. Hopefully things will change with the new owners.

And in that regard, good luck to David, John and the team - I wish them every success and hope to see bit-tech running successfully for years to come.