In a short couple of weeks, Haverzine will turn seven months old – just five months away from a full year. It’s actually insane for me to think about the site in those terms – this journey started much, much earlier for me. As I’ve recounted before, I began work on Haverzine in early February of this year and worked almost constantly day in and day out (around other obligations, of course) to plan and create a site and design that I knew that not only I, but all of us, could be proud of.

It’s insane to think that, as the calendar now reads November, I’ve now launched the second big update to the site – and almost certainly the largest since I first launched the site in April. I’ve taken to calling things by version names, so keeping with that tradition I’d like to welcome you all to Haverzine 1.2. There’s a lot new here.

You’ll notice that we’ve added a new widget in the sidebar to the right that gives you an up-front look at our five most recent featured articles without needing to scroll through the large image banner at the top, something I’ve been fiddling with the idea for some time now. Speaking of featured articles, I’ve also gotten rid of the border to the left and the right of the pager and increased the image that accompanies a both to take advantage of all the room the layout has to offer.

We’ve also added subtitles, which are in green on top of every article header, a way to give readers more information about articles at a glance. These are little snippets of information that don’t really belong in an article’s title, but still relevant to the overall of the story.

A lot of work has been put into decreasing the overall size and load times for the site over the months, and that’s really paid off here. All of these new features and site redesigns add next to nothing to load times, and are way under our original load times. Our intense focus on optimizing the site to be as fast as possible for those with slower connections remains as strong as ever, and we will continue to bring load times down in future updates.

Again, I’d like to thank every single one of you reading this right now for supporting the site in whatever capacity you have. Haverzine is around because we believe that the tech space needs a news site that focuses on quality, not quantity. We believe that when you create something truly special, it makes every second spent doing that thing all the more special. We’ll have more to announce on some exciting additions and changes before long, but until then, keep on rocking.