Hey everyone,
We write news, reviews and other content for you every day, but it’s not often (enough) that we engage in discussion directly with you, our audience.
It’s something we want to do a lot more of.
Ausdroid Beta
Some of you who’ve had an eye on our social media channels will have come across the Ausdroid Beta project that we’re working on. In a nutshell, it’s a replacement for the present Ausdroid theme which we unveiled late last year, which was itself a stopgap solution to get us to a cleaner, more responsive (and more mobile friendly!) layout. From today, we’re going to open that beta up to everyone.
Check it out at ausdroid.net/beta/
Signups will be open for the afternoon, and after that we’ll lock it down again while we continue to work on it. We’d like a few people to have access to the “work in progress” though, so you can see what we’re working on. You’ll notice some features are disabled on the beta site, such as comments (basically the site is read-only while it’s being developed) but otherwise all our news will be there.
Ausdroid’s Social Media
We’ve also grown our social media channels. While we interact more with people on Twitter and Google+ than we do on Facebook, we’d encourage you to follow us on whichever social networks you prefer. It helps make sure you get our latest news, and get all the member exclusives when they happen.
- Follow us on Twitter at @ausdroid
- Check us out on Facebook at /ausdroid
- We’re on Google+ as +Ausdroid
- We even Instagram as Ausdroid as well
- We have a Pinterest. If anyone knows how to use Pinterest and wants to run it… volunteers? No, we aren’t linking to it. There’s nothing there!
Why you should join our newsletter
One of our newest experiments, which we’re enjoying quite a lot, is our mailing list. We’ve not really attempted this in the past, and we’re already nearing 2,000 subscribers. You might wonder why exactly you might sign up for yet another newsletter. It’s simple really. In the last few months, our newsletter subscribers have had exclusive access to:
- A $50 Play gift card for New Year
- A $20 Play gift card towards the end of January
- Early access to a Motorola Moto G giveaway before the public got access
- More recently, $100 in Play gift cards
You see, Ausdroid frequently has things to give away, and we like to thank people who support the site with preferential access to giveaway prizes. If you’re not yet a newsletter subscriber, perhaps you should be. Sign up here, and reap the rewards.
Just to show we’re serious, for every one hundred subscribers that join, we’ll pick one randomly to win a $20 Play gift card just to say thank you.
We’ll open these conversations up regularly, but we also want to include you guys in this. What sort of things would you like to see covered on Ausdroid coming up? Here’s your opportunity to get some direct input to us, so we can look at different areas in the coming weeks.
As always, don’t hesitate to get in touch. We love to talk with you guys about Android, the site, and the weather. Got ideas for new features we should offer? Let us know.
Best,
Chris, Daniel, Jason and the team
Overall it looks fantastic. Very clean and easy to get to the information you want / need. Small points, 1. The search box isn’t noticeable. Very very easy to skip over the fact it exists as there is no border/outline/background to make it stand out. 2. If menus could start hidden on mobile instead of being visible until hidden by JS it would stop the movement of elements that is happening on pageload. And for bonus points, for stuff that doesn’t need to be done. 3. You really should be using the placeholder element (searchbox), and only adding a JS… Read more »
The ‘Author’ section looks like it’s using a percentage width and therefore very narrow in a mobile viewport.
There’s probably a few other things in the CSS, but I’m sure you’ve got someone working on all that.
Looking forward to what’s to come from all of this!
I haven’t looked for Australian Android communities on Google+ … how active are you guys on there?
Yeah Ian we’ve noticed that too. Looks alright on a tablet, but I’ll check it on a phone tomorrow and make some changes.
We’re fairly active on G+, definitely moreso than Facebook, and probably about even with Twitter. Check us out at http://google.com/+ausdroid
Hit a somewhat serious bug.
Replies posted on the beta site are not transferring through to the regular site.
Make that a bigger problem…
Replies posted on pages on the Beta site are not showing on the Beta site when those pages are refreshed.
We did say comments were disabled. They won’t work.
They’re not fully disabled, Chris.
Using the beta site, I posted a test comment to the new LG tablets article.
On the beta site, the article is saying there are 4 comments, but is only displaying the 3 Disqus comments.
Comments, like all other content in beta, sync from the main site. Any changes made there are wiped by the main site content every five minutes. So comment here. Not there.
On the beta site, the article links in the Latest Comments panel point to the regular Ausdroid site and not the beta.
Disqus user avatar pics are MIA on the beta site.
Thanks Jenny, we’re aware of both those things; it’s a side effect of having the site content mirrored between the two environments. Both will be fixed when / if finally implemented.
I like the new Beta look. A couple of comments:
– The Ad Banner on the left at the top is a little annoying. Appreciate you are trying to get more Ad’s but it breaks the flow I think.
– Stretched Images for each Article, nothing that annoys me more then stretched images.
– Ad’s disappear after a certain width but the space is still there
Hey Luke, thanks for the feedback. We’re working out the best placement for ads meeting the requests of our advertisers, as well as not upsetting our users. We’re working on it! 🙂
As for the stretched images, we’re working on the best compromise there, too. The current theme crops the images and it looks terrible, so we’re trying to work out a better way to accommodate images of different sizes. Same with disappearing ads.
Hello Chris,
Noticed the site is up and running. Again the images on the home page are annoying me. Can I suggest to remove the image height on them and it will look 100% better. That way the image is not stretched up. If you look at he image on this article, it looks horrible. Thanks
Will look at this tomorrow Luke.. It’s been a tough evening fixing servers. I’m done until I’ve slept some 😉
Totally understand, if something going to go wrong, its going to go very wrong. Enjoy
That’s usually the way Luke; it looks like the image height issue is now fixed, too 🙂