eclecticrubbish is painfully tired. - Aug 08 add/view comments (0)

It's been a long, long, LONG time, but we're finally pushing out new releases that ought to start making a difference in the way everyone uses the site.

We just pushed out a pretty major change, removing the old login page and having people jump straight to the home page, including for login. So far, the reviews have been positive!

There are other changes around; blogs got put back into the nav bar, for instance, and having red alerts up on the top of the page when you get invites or page logs or notes.

Read more here: Member Advocate's Blog Post

Wow.

Been over a year since I've posted. In that time, in roughly chronological order...

• Community Connect Inc. was acquired by Radio One, and is now known as Interactive One.
• We launched a whole bunch of new sites, like TheUrbanDaily and HelloBeautiful.  They are our first sites running on WordPress, the popular open-source blogging platform.
• I spoke w/ a coworker at Oracle Open World.  (Not the biggest crowd I've ever spoken in front of, the session was small, but certainly the biggest conference I've ever spoken at.  Over 50k attendees.)
• The world economy collapsed.
• We finally got Bush out of office (not to mention making history w/ our new president!)
• I got married!  And, in doing so, acquired another 2 children... bringing the grand total up to 4!  (Yes, I'm insane.  But it's still awesome.)
• My mother and brother moved - to Mexico!
• My grandfather died.

Anyways, that's just the high-level stuff.  There've been a million other things that've gone down in that time, too, but I can't remember anything else.

So you're probably wondering about the sites.  Once again, we're in the process of making some major changes, and once again, we've had some stability issues.  In this case, we're upgrading to a bleeding edge version of Oracle, which has caused some issues, and switching some other technologies on the back-end, and getting ready to launch some new sites, AND doing a data center move!  Big things, once again.  The good news is, the majority of the issues should be over with in a few weeks, and then hopefully we can go back to the good old (?) stability and performance you've come to know and love on BP.

(Having said that - there are other enhancements, pretty major ones, coming up down the pike this year.  When all is said and done, I think the new stuff will put the old stuff to shame!  But I'll wait until we're closer to releasing something people can play with before I get into any more details.)

See you all in another year.  ;)

...since my last post. Figured I ought to update periodically.

We've had a bunch of outages on the site, and that's our fault. (My team, specifically, was involved in most of them.) There was a new release to the site - which we had a standard maintenance window for. But we've also suffered from several hardware failures and also a human error, each of which led to a period of downtime. Hopefully we've gotten that all behind us, now, and things should run stably.

On the plus side, though, the new release is good and on top of that we rolled out our new Spam fighting solution, which I helped to put together, and I'm very happy with. Member Services has already reported an improvement to the spam on the site - hopefully you'll all notice it as well, soon!

We've got some big improvements in the plan, the site should be running much faster and more stably over the next few months. We're also testing out new service providers for some of our content - trying to get rid of the slow ones and get more fast ones, and maybe even save a buck in the process. All in all, a lot of good changes coming up on BP soon. Keep your eyes open. And let me know if you see any spam!