And that’s it. We’re pretty much closing the office down now for the year, and we’ll be operating on a skeleton crew until Monday 6th January. If anything big does come up, we’ll pop back online to cover it, but other than keeping an eye on comment spam and security over the break we’re off for a bit of much needed R&R.

Before we go, however, there’s just time to thank you, our readers, for making this an amazing start to what we hope will be many years of htxt.africa. We launched back in June, convinced that there was something missing from the South African blogosphere when it came to tech, and going by the numbers we think we’ve found it.

In the first six months we’ve grown to an audience level that puts us on course to become South Africa’s second or third largest tech site by early 2014, and although we’re proud of the fact that we have a predominantly local audience, we’ve also been featured on international sites like Fast Company, iAfrica, the front page of Reddit, Slashdot, DailyTech and ZDNet*. Our stories have also been referenced by other South African media, including MyBroadband, Radio 702, CNBC Africa, Daily Maverick, Lazygamer, Moneyweb, IT Web and even Mpumalanga News.

We think we’ve achieved a lot, including two spin-off sites already, and we’ve only just started.

So thank you, for a wonderful 2013. All we can promise at this stage is that 2014 will be even better, and we’ve got some awesome surprises planned for our very first day back. In the meantime, we’ll be kicking off a series looking at the best and most interesting stories of the last year, along with our gadget and gear awards. That’s our two-week long year in review, which will begin tomorrow. You can stay in touch with us via Facebook or Twitter or our very own awesom-o-forum over here.

Stay tuned…

*We write for them, so it doesn’t really count.

(Image: Shutterstock)

PS – Like the new look? Tell us what you think here…