I'm Missing Shows!
JamBase's web hosting company, Rackspace, had a major power outage tonight in their Dallas data center, which happens to host our servers. As a result, the site was down for about 2 hours, no connectivity, nothing.
Apparently bad news travels quickly, and within minutes TechCrunch, valleywag, and laughing squid were posting updates to the incident. Turns out we live amidst good company, as our well respected friends 37 Signals are also hosted there.
Luckily, we're back up now...all systems are a go.
I figured this is as good of a time as any to bring to light some of the updates and activity that have gone on for 'da base in the past few months.
Since launching the newly redesigned and re-architectured JamBase website in August, we got a flurry of feedback from our community, both good and bad. Sifting through and processing all the responses and reactions to the new site has been a challenging process, as I've been at the center of the storm, replying to each email individually and reading every comment with an over-sensitive, critical eye for what can be made better. I've had to keep reminding myself that everyone has an opinion, typically the complaints get heard the loudest, and making something better for one person will inevitably break it for someone else.
With all that in mind, we focused the initial 'post-launch' fixes on what was legitimately broken. Actual, non-opinionated bugs which anyone could look at and say, "yea, that doesn't work quite right". While we did extensive testing before launch, we couldn't possibly account for the infinite combination of searches, individual preferences and random issues that popped up from a total overhaul.
This past Friday we pushed up another set of fixes and enhancements, and we're excited to finally be getting into some new stuff after a few months of simply addressing the bugs.
Most notably is the addition of a new "Show Finder" on the homepage. We heard loud and clear the cries that people wanted the advanced search functions first thing when they visited the site, and not have to find them or stumble into them. I hope this alleviates some of the previous stress and anxiety.
We also added Google Maps to the event info pages. We'd been wanting to do this for several years, ever since I put the JamBase Maps feature together. Props to Mason for working it out.
While this latest release symbolically represents a nice point of tackling most of the factual bug fixes, we've still got our hands full. We've become extremely fanatical about Search and are working on improving our main search functions to create the best live music search experience in the world. If you run across an unexpected search experience on JamBase and want to help us test our new index, please email bugs[at]jambase.com and we'll invite you to the group.
We've of course got our eyes set on a solid set of new enhancements and features, but I'll save the details until we're ready to announce.
Rest assured, these past few months have taught us a tremendous amount about building a solid product which keeps fans happy, while also appreciating the various different perspectives and merits of testing early and often.
One final comment on this. A bunch of people have written in to say, "If it ain't broken, don't fix it!" I kind of agree with this, if you're talking about a refrigerator. With JamBase, we felt that we had taken it about as far as we could go with the previous design and infrastructure. While it might have worked perfectly for your show going needs after years of adapting to that format, we have high hopes for what the service can become. By tearing it apart and putting it back together again, it allowed us to take a critical look at all of our features, understand what people really use and want and give us a chance to make it even better for the future.
I sincerely appreciate people sticking with us as it felt like we were taking a step back to hopefully take two steps forward, and know that we have an ongoing commitment to never settling and constantly focusing on what you, the fan wants.
That is, if they can keep the lights on...
Apparently bad news travels quickly, and within minutes TechCrunch, valleywag, and laughing squid were posting updates to the incident. Turns out we live amidst good company, as our well respected friends 37 Signals are also hosted there.
Luckily, we're back up now...all systems are a go.
I figured this is as good of a time as any to bring to light some of the updates and activity that have gone on for 'da base in the past few months.
Since launching the newly redesigned and re-architectured JamBase website in August, we got a flurry of feedback from our community, both good and bad. Sifting through and processing all the responses and reactions to the new site has been a challenging process, as I've been at the center of the storm, replying to each email individually and reading every comment with an over-sensitive, critical eye for what can be made better. I've had to keep reminding myself that everyone has an opinion, typically the complaints get heard the loudest, and making something better for one person will inevitably break it for someone else.
With all that in mind, we focused the initial 'post-launch' fixes on what was legitimately broken. Actual, non-opinionated bugs which anyone could look at and say, "yea, that doesn't work quite right". While we did extensive testing before launch, we couldn't possibly account for the infinite combination of searches, individual preferences and random issues that popped up from a total overhaul.
This past Friday we pushed up another set of fixes and enhancements, and we're excited to finally be getting into some new stuff after a few months of simply addressing the bugs.
Most notably is the addition of a new "Show Finder" on the homepage. We heard loud and clear the cries that people wanted the advanced search functions first thing when they visited the site, and not have to find them or stumble into them. I hope this alleviates some of the previous stress and anxiety.
We also added Google Maps to the event info pages. We'd been wanting to do this for several years, ever since I put the JamBase Maps feature together. Props to Mason for working it out.
While this latest release symbolically represents a nice point of tackling most of the factual bug fixes, we've still got our hands full. We've become extremely fanatical about Search and are working on improving our main search functions to create the best live music search experience in the world. If you run across an unexpected search experience on JamBase and want to help us test our new index, please email bugs[at]jambase.com and we'll invite you to the group.
We've of course got our eyes set on a solid set of new enhancements and features, but I'll save the details until we're ready to announce.
Rest assured, these past few months have taught us a tremendous amount about building a solid product which keeps fans happy, while also appreciating the various different perspectives and merits of testing early and often.
One final comment on this. A bunch of people have written in to say, "If it ain't broken, don't fix it!" I kind of agree with this, if you're talking about a refrigerator. With JamBase, we felt that we had taken it about as far as we could go with the previous design and infrastructure. While it might have worked perfectly for your show going needs after years of adapting to that format, we have high hopes for what the service can become. By tearing it apart and putting it back together again, it allowed us to take a critical look at all of our features, understand what people really use and want and give us a chance to make it even better for the future.
I sincerely appreciate people sticking with us as it felt like we were taking a step back to hopefully take two steps forward, and know that we have an ongoing commitment to never settling and constantly focusing on what you, the fan wants.
That is, if they can keep the lights on...
Labels: jambase
posted by Andy at
8:54 PM
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