Jason McIntosh: February 2009 Archives

Sometimes - such as right now, while I'm writing this - the datasource we get Xbox Live user info from goes offline for a while, and so in place of XBL userpics and online-status updates, the site becomes filled with dashed-outline placeholder images and 'Unknown' status tags.

There's not a lot we can do about this, so long as we are relying on (rather unstable) third-party information sources which, in all cases, are just other people's hobby-projects. I'll be frank here - what we'd really like is access to Microsoft's Xbox.com Community Developer Program, or something like it. The XCDP's own page (link to Google Cache) says that they're not open to further membership, but I've heard conflicting information about this from other sources If you happen to know anything about this one way or the other, feel free drop me a line, or comment here...

After some user feedback made it clear that most folks weren't aware that getting email and IM notifications for about-to-start events was an opt-in procedure, I tweaked the code to so that newly created users now start out with all notifications turned on.

If you signed up for an account prior to Feb. 24, you still need to opt in to receive email or IM notifications. Visit your preferences page, which you can find under the toolbar link, and then tick the appropriate checkboxes and hit the "Update contact info" button. Similarly, newer users may opt out by visiting the same page and un-ticking checkboxes to their pleasure.

Planbeast.com is back, at its new home. So far, pages are loading like whoa. I am pleased with this outcome.

Figuring that Monday morning's as good a time as any for a video game site with only a handful of users, I'm taking Planbeast offline with no warning, so that I can move it over to our new server. 

I spent all day Saturday migrating the Planbeast software to a new server at a different, and hopefully better, hosting provider. After a week of trying to work with our current providers about this, we decided that a solution just isn't going to happen unless we go elsewhere.

I currently consider us to have no bug/feature fires actively burning, and so we are giving our full attention to the slowness issue now. It's so bad that, often as not, someone visiting the site for the first time gets the "Be back in a bit" error page, meaning that the FastCGI server running Planbeast took more than 30 seconds to respond to the request, and the controlling Apache server gave up on it. That's just unacceptable. (It happens more often to visitors who don't yet have our CSS and JS files cached locally, causing their browsers to make more HTTP request against our molasses-slow server.)

In response to user demand, you can now browse a full list of games. This feature's linked from the main games page. I also made the instructions about using the quick-search textbox a little more clear.

We've been having some issues with the site being intermittently slow or inaccessible. This drove me to make some efficiency improvements to the way that the pages are rendered and delivered, which is a good thing, but the problems seem to run deeper than that.

Planbeast.com currently runs on a VPS (virtual private server) at tektonic.net, and we suspect that one of our neighbors with whom we share space on a physical machine is doing something rude, such as hogging access to the hard disk. We're running some analysis programs, and working with tektonic on getting to the bottom of this issue.

We had our soft launch yesterday. The site is now live at http://planbeast.com.

I sent out my first invitations to join to my own Xbox Live friends list, and bug reports and feature requests are already starting to trundle in. This is excellent.

My plan is to not actively promote the site until it's proven its usefulness and usability to people who are not its developers. That said, I am encouraging folks on the site already to go ahead and invite their own friends on board - just don't go nuts with the blogging yet. We're not quite ready for a slashdotting of any magnitude.

This shyness begs the question of why we're doing an open public beta right out of the gate, versus a closed beta. In fact, we'd originally planned to start off closed, and I went so far as to spend a significant amount of time designing and implementing an invitation-only system. It's still running behind the scenes, in fact - it's just switched off. And it will probably stay that way: we later decided that, given the fact that a system like Planbeast is only really useful when it has lots of users registered with it, artificially restricting the number of user registrations at any time would make the site less meaningful for its initial users, and therefore would make initial testing less valuable. So, instead, we just threw the doors wide.

What do you think?

Hello and welcome.

As I write this, we're in the home stretch of preparing for Planbeast's soft launch. We're in the phase where we're writing a lot of copy, and I find myself obliged to make a lot of links to something called "The Planbast Blog", so I figured that I ought to go put something there. Et voila.

In typical crazy startup project bloggy fashion, the idea is to use this site as a tool for communicating with you, the Planbeast-using (or perhaps only Planbeast-curious) public, about what's going on behind the scenes, and give you a platform for communicating directly with us via the comment system.

Looking forward to seeing some interesting things happen!