Mobile Broadband Rocks Reloaded!

The eager-eyed readers out there will have noticed that Mobile Broadband Rocks has been a little quiet over the last few months, there's two exciting reasons why this is so - firstly I've been travelling around Asia since quitting my job at Vodafone in January and secondly - as you've probably noticed - I've redesigned and relaunched the site!

A bit of history
Mobile Broadband Rocks started as an unofficial mouthpiece during my time as Product Manager at Vodafone (the blog was called Mobile Connected back then), allowing me to publish tips, tricks and downloads that would have been difficult through Vodafone's normal channels (as the average Voda customer doesn't care about optimal TCP settings or flashing E220 firmware).  Mobile Connected launched back in early 2007 and over the last three years traffic has been rapidly increasing and the site is now visited by over 60,000 people every month.

Time for a change
With the rising popularity of mobile broadband there's more and more experts (such as you) out there.  The comments on the blog prove this - they're used to flame or praise networks, share tips and tricks and give pointers to the latest firmware or driver downloads.  Over the last year the value added by Mobile Broadband Rocks has shifted away from the content that I post towards the discussions you're having and the advice you're giving each other.  

This overhaul of Mobile Broadband Rocks is designed to give you better tools to share, recommend and discuss all things related to mobile broadband.  If I were still a corporate type I'd say "we're shifting the site paradigm to community driven content".  Eugh.  I'm not, so how about this - I'm giving you the keys to the site.

A quick tour
Here's a quick run down of what's changed:

• Reviews - you can create and share reviews of mobile broadband networks, dongles and laptops - other visitors can also vote and comment on your reviews
• Support and downloads - get support from other mobile broadband users and browse downloads for your device (you can update this list - if you find a cool download please go ahead and add it).
• Forums - previously most discussions were happening in the blog comments, we've set up a home for discussions in our forums
• Deal finders - there's a huge amount of mobile broadband deals out there at the moment and it seems everyone's giving away laptops and netbooks too, you'll now find links to mobile broadband deals plus you can vote for the best deals

Techie tour
If you're not at all interested in web technology, you can skip this bit :)

Mobile Broadband Rocks has been running as a WordPress blog since day 1.  It's proved to be a wonderful platform: rock solid, speedy and dead easy to use.  I can't recommend it enough.  However, to build all these great features I needed a new platform - enter Drupal 6.

Drupal's a dream for building complex community sites - the vast amount of community contributed modules have made the site build a refreshing case of "config, not code".  In fact, porting all of the content over from the old site and building 80% of the features was done in less than 60 hours using no more than 200 lines of custom code.  I'll be writing up a full technical review for drupal.org shortly, stay tuned.

I've taken this opportunity to move Mobile Broadband Rocks to a new host - when testing the new site I quickly hit a performance bottleneck with the existing host, causing Drupal to bail.  I've moved the site over to the folks at Media Temple - I'll be watching closely over the next few weeks to see how the site performs.


And finally...
Thanks to everyone who's commented on the blog, linked to us or supported us over the last three years.  I hope you like the changes we've made - now I want to ask you a small favour - help get the ball rolling by writing a review, adding a download or posting in the forums.  Also, if you'd like to write for the blog please get in touch - james@mobilebroadbandrocks.com, I'm always happy to hear from guest and regular writers.

Enjoy the site,

James, Mobile Broadband Rocks