Site Changes are Live, Some Truth and Next Steps

Posted on by Peter

There are some pretty big changes in store with this release. Here’s the breakdown of major items you’ll want to check out:

  • Overall Design Cleanup: New logo, solidified color palette, better and cleaner layouts, bug fixes, and usability improvements.
  • The entire public site has been smartphone mobile optimized
  • Redesigned and expanded Leaderboards page with new leaderboards.
  • Redesigned Content Pages including new summary detail markup: Mazda RX8 Review
  • New Video Player with full HD support (I’ve been itching to try this recipe, thanks Eggy!): Singaporean Mixed Vegatable Curry Recipe
  • New Player Profile Pages: Check out Joan’s, one of our premier Topic(Category) Experts

There are many other changes and reveals, but I’ll leave that up to you to figure out until we open things up completely.

Some Truth

When you face your limitations on an ongoing, continual, and repeated basis, you start to realize that something has to change. After another 72 hour run of sleepless testing and development, I’ve come to the conclusion that the historical strategy I’ve taken of announcing completely unrealistic release timelines to support the facade of a big development team working on SR, and then scrambling to make them happen all while circus music plays in the background, just doesn’t cut it any longer. So before we go any further, I need to admit some truths:

  • If you haven’t guessed it already, for the last 3-4 years SharedReviews’ daily operations have pretty much fallen to my shoulders alone.
  • The majority of my skills fall in business, and entrepreneurship, not development or design (my respect for which has appreciated extensively these last few years).
  • When you spend most of your time doing things that aren’t core to where your experience lies, you tend to underestimate effort and overestimate your capabilities.

Hopefully the above will at least partially explain the missed deadlines and crappy communication. I’m also hoping that it will foster some additional understanding and patience as we move forward.

Next Steps

Having said the above, I hope everyone will understand when I say that we probably won’t have any more changes until the 1st of June. Not that I expect it will take that long to get our Beta Testers into the site, but as part of turning a new leaf, I’d prefer to overestimate and surprise as opposed to underestimate and disappoint. This means that I expect:

  • Beta Testers will receive access on June 1st. BTW, we are still looking for more participants that meet certain criteria. Please email info@ with your account nickname and a paragraph on how you can help if you’re interested
  • All existing players should receive access within 1-2 weeks after that, depending on testing results
  • New player invitations will start to be sent out near the end of June in batches, based on a first come first serve basis

April Fool’s Fail!

You may notice the “new logo” we displayed about a month ago doesn’t quite look like the new one on the site. It was meant to be a bit of a prank, and I was hoping to unveil the real “new logo” with this release on April 1st.

Quick Downtime Scheduled for Tomorrow Night

Posted on by Peter

Update Apr 19 10:30AM EST: We are so close, I’m aiming for the changes to be live early evening today.. maybe even sooner

Update: Downtime Delayed – I found a few problems when updating our production servers that did not show up in our testing environment. I identified the issues, and worked all night to correct them, but after a 23 hour run I’m seeing double and still have a few more hours of heavy testing to complete. I’ll re-attempt the release later this evening when I’m a bit more coherent, and post an update here as soon as I do. Thanks

This is just a quick announcement that we are planning to update the site tomorrow night just before Midnight. We don’t expect too long of a downtime, more than likely less than 5 minutes.

I realize we’ve been quite quiet as of late, and things are taking much longer than anyone anticipated. I’ll follow up with a detailed “Where we’re at” post the morning of Wednesday the 18th. Thanks for the patience!

Release Update

Posted on by Peter

In the final stages of testing last week, we came across a bit of a flaw that, although wasn’t catastrophic, was big enough that it required a fix prior to the release. Unfortunately, that fix involved a pretty big re-code of almost the entire new Achievement system for accomplishing milestones (such as hitting 100 published content items).

We’ve finished re-coding everything today, but we want to make sure we do some extensive testing before finally letting the public release go live. We expect to be done over the weekend, and Monday night is our target (some extensive data massaging will require a downtime of a couple of hours or so).

I’ll let loose with another update after the weekend.
UPDATE Monday March 19th: We’ve been testing all weekend, and although things have gone well, I’m just not confident enough for a full public launch until we refine a couple of nagging issues. At this stage we’re going to move the release to Wednesday evening. I’ll post more specific Wednesday morning. Thanks for the patience!

Author Player Pages Release & New Logo Sneak Peek

Posted on by Peter

When we released the new look and feel for SharedReviews back in September, to put it mildly, it was a little rushed. This meant some pages, layouts, and items just weren’t ready and we had to basically create temporary pages in their stead. Two major areas were content pages, and the public player pages.

On Friday March 9th, we’re going to release the last set of changes to the public site before author access. This will include the final designs of the content page layouts, and the new release of player public pages (Content, Achievements, and Profile).

Another item that was rushed was the new logo, and we felt it would be befitting to give a bit of a sneak peak before we release it Friday.

I’ll post another update before Friday with specifics on the downtime for this release.
Update: It doesn’t look like the changes are going to go live today. We have finalized all the design and layout stuff, but the optimization part (checking different browsers, checking for slowness or bottlenecks, testing caching etc..) may take a couple of more days. I’m hoping Monday evening at the latest.

Beta Tester Launch Update & Sneak Peak

Posted on by Peter

Ok, we’re making great progress.. obviously not as fast as we had hoped, but the light at the end of the tunnel is not only visible but getting brighter each and every day. We’ve delayed some of the code changes we were hoping to go live last night until after the weekend, which means beta testers will more than likely not gain access until the middle of next week. I still expect we’re on schedule for the general author launch between the 1st and 15th of next month (probably closer to the 15th).

We really didn’t want to let any of the kittens out of the bag just yet, but I felt it was important to share at least a little something that will hopefully go a long way to prove just how much work was involved in this release.

Below you’ll find a small screenshot of a section of the new friends management interface just showing some friends in my friends list. I won’t explain each of the changes we applied, and there are some bogus numbers and statuses inserted just to highlight functionality, but I hope you’ll see that if even a minor interface such as this has been changed so significantly, we have some great surprises in store for when things finally go live. My next update, and another potential sneak peak, will be after the weekend on Monday the 27th.

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