The Hawkize engineering team is proud to announce the launch of the Hawkize 2.0 beta on this fine Tuesday.  After many hours of work, we’ve finally got something that’s worth showing to the public.  Aside from a little aesthetic boost, there are a few new features and changes that you should know about:

My Hawkize
In order to comment on articles, you are now required to register a username and password.  We had some problems with both comment spam and morons from Iowa State, so this should help clean that up.  Now you can be assured that any comments coming from a Hawkize personality are authentic, and also that nobody will comment under your name.

Hawkize Hotline
This is probably the coolest new feature we’ve added yet.  You can call the Hawkize Hotline at 206.666.HAWK (4295) from your cell phone or land line and leave a voice message at any time.  The message is then e-mailed to us in .wav format so we can do whatever we want with it.  This could get interesting should we ever decide to start podcasting, but it should be entertaining even without that.  Basically, we’re expecting a bunch of drunk dials and a lot of funny shit…and probably some broken english and nonsense from some Iowa State fans.  We’ll post anything we think is worth sharing, so save the number in your phone and dial away.

Search
The search function received a major upgrade.  It is now fully AJAX compatible…which (for the non-nerds) means that it searches quickly and returns the results without refreshing the page.  Now you can find all your favorite past articles much easier.  Also, the results box won’t be pink for much longer.

Google Adwords
We stuck some advertising on the right side as a shameless way to make a buck or two.  Sales at the store were underwhelming to say the least, so we’re going to supplement that with some text ads.  Andyram has a lot of legal trouble, so we need all the money we can get if we want him to keep posting.

As we mentioned, this version is still in beta, so we’re not done yet.  Some things may still be broken (i.e. e-mail this article), and we’re working on those.  If you find anything abnormal and you think we should know about it, please comment on this post or send an e-mail to colestal@hawkize.com.  We’ll keep you updated as the development progresses.  And yes, funny posts are coming. Enjoy!