About Texyt

Texyt is a website with news and features about science, technology, travel and other subjects. Texyt focuses on showing existing news stories from a new angle, and on original reporting and analysis from worldwide contributors.

We don't attempt to cover everything. We value quality over quantity: Texyt will not waste your time with long and pointless rewrites of news that has already been done better on other websites.

Texyt is still in beta. We could say that we are fine-tuning our content mix to maximize the end user experience, but we don't like to be so long-winded. You may notice the site design change during this testing period. We will only be adding about five new stories each week for the first few months, while we work out bugs in the site and develop our CMS and editorial system.

If you like what you've read on Texyt, we suggest you subscribe to our RSS feed .

How to get an account

Although the site is not officially open, you are welcome to sign up for an account now. As a member, your comments will be posted immediately, instead of waiting to be checked. You can also customize how you see the site, including changing the theme, disabling some of the advertising, and so on. In fact, for the time being, registered users see no advertising when they are logged in. Signing up will also prevent anyone else from registering your favorite user name, of course.

The stories you will find on Texyt are divided into two categories. News stories are short news items, including both original stories and brief summaries of interesting information from other websites - with a link to the source. Features are longer stories, researched by Texyt staff and contributors. Features contain a combination of original news and analysis that you won't find on other websites. Texyt is written and edited by contributors in the US, Europe, and Asia.

How to help

If you like Texyt, you can help us a lot by reporting bugs you notice on the site, please mention the page address and the web browser you are using. If you'd like to write for Texyt, we don't have any vacancies now, but we will have paid work available as we expand later this year. You're welcome to contact us now with a short summary of your previous journalistic experience, including links or samples of your published work (this is an essential requirement, sorry).

If you have news tips please send them in. We won't make your email address public. If you don't want your name or website published, please tell us. 

How to contact us

Please refer to our contact page. You can also add comments directly to the page you are now looking at.

Update March 17: We are moving Texyt.com to a new server over the weekend (Mar 17-18), because we have been receiving far more visitors than we expected during this testing phase (that's a good thing, of course).

While this server changeover takes place, you may have intermittent problems posting comments or emailing us. Sorry about this. If you emailed us recently and got a  'User unknown in virtual alias table' message, please try again. This is a temporary email forwarding and/or MX record problem that should resolve itself soon.

Update March 22/23: Apologies to anyone who's had trouble reaching the site today. We've had a huge amount of traffic (not sure how much because we had to turn off the local stats monitoring - maybe 200,000 hits - appears to have been more than 10,000 page loads an hour at the peak). We weren't properly prepared for this and the site went down for five hours.

March 23: The server is back to normal at the moment, but using a long cache time, so your comments could take a while to appear - don't worry, unless they're spam, they'll show up eventually. Thanks to the many people who have signed up or posted comments.

April 25: We've begun adding additional features for members, including the ability to change the site theme. Some of these features might take a few hours to enable on your account after you've signed up.

April 26: Yes the site was down earlier today - thank you for the emails. We had some problems with a software update and needed to roll back the database to yesterday's back up. A few comments were lost - sorry, and the posting time stamp on some recent ones got shifted by ten hours or so.

May 4: Some new members have not received their sign up passwords - apparently due to our server's emails bouncing. If you haven't received your password within a few minutes. E-mail us, and we'll sort it out.

May 7: Despite very heavy traffic (700+ users online simultaneously at the moment), the site is still performing well. You may experience occasional slow page loads, however, and possibly need to reload the page if the database gets overloaded momentarily and you see a 404 error.

May 22: Apologies for the lack of updates today - database problem - will be fixed tomorrow.