Not Quite Ready for Beta, yet.

Just a quick note. We made good progress last weekend and got very close, but there are a few issues that we want to correct before we start the limited beta. We’re down to cleanup and automation, so it shouldn’t be much longer.

Stay tuned…

Beta Rollout Tentatively Scheduled For This Weekend

Those who have requested entry into the beta and friends and family who will help us out with testing the new version should get to try it as soon as this next weekend. I’m putting the last touches that we absolutely have in there so it will be ready.

Some things like the appearance of the votes may still be kinda clunky at that point (and the admin pages on our side are definitely clunky) but it should all hang together to make a version of LOL that is a huge improvement over the old version.

Improvements will be pretty continuous through the beta from a laundry list of to-dos I’ve already got and whatever the beta testers reveal, but I’m hoping that by the first week of April we can roll out the new version for general use.

We have a size

Some of you may care about design. John was researching an age old question, “what is the predominant browser area”. The answer? 776 x 424. Basically, if we design for 776 x 424, 95% of you will not have to scroll to see the content.

Some might be asking, “where did the magic numbers come from”? Thomas Baekda’s report “Actual Browser Sizes“. In his report, he documents how he captured browser window sizes from visitors, crunched the numbers, and came to his conclusions.

Digging a little deeper, I discovered that he seems to have used a “pepper” from Mint. What is Mint? “Mint is an extensible web site analytics program. Its interface is an exercise in simplicity. Visits, referrers, popular pages and searches can all be taken in at a glance on Mint’s flexible dashboard.”

March to Beta

I just wanted to drop in a little note saying development is progressing at a nice pace. John is busily working on features and I made a little progress on deployment, not nearly as much as I’d like though. I’ve got family coming in this weekend, so who knows what if any progress’ll be made on the deployment side.

We can’t tell you when, but sometime in the future we’ll be having a limited beta to test the new site. Here are the requirements.

• Create an OpenID at MyOpenId.com
• Then send an email to lol.submissions@gmail.com with Beta User in the subject and your OpenId in the body of the email.