Production Blog

Michael Cera (Juno, Arrested Development, Super Bad) just become our 12,226th Producer!

After two years of work, we finally launched our new site today!

This is a soft launch, so please don't share the link with everyone just yet; we want to make sure everything works first. :)

We've made lots of changes, and there are bound to be lots of things to fix, so if you come across something, please let me know.

New Visitors: If you're new here and want to sign up, please click the "join for free" button, and let me know if you have any issues/feedback.

We're finally nearing launch of our new Drupal 5 site! The last time we launched a new site, we landed on the home page of digg, thousands of folks visited, and our server crashed. This time, we're trying to be better prepared by optimizing our site performance before launch.

Optimizing Drupal is an art in itself. To get advice, we reached out to some experts in the field, and were fortunate to receive a consultation from Matt Westgate of Lullabot. Lullabot is among the world's top Drupal companies, and recently deployed the website for the Grammy's (grammys.com), which successfully handled over 280 million visitors on a single day! The Grammy's site was hosted on 50,000 optimized servers- which is no small challenge logistically. Needless to say, the Lullabot's know their stuff, and I took detailed notes.

Egads, I'm behind in keeping up with this blog! Hopefully, you are following us on twitter and facebook, where I've been more micro-blogging production updates.

But a lot has been happening! DA&D featured us in a full page national spot in the UK Metro (Jan 12, 2010).  It's a pretty cool piece. Check out the article on flickr, download a PSD, or read the DA&D blog post.

We're finally Beta Testing the new site! You guys and gals are among the first to this site, which has been in the works for some time now.

There are still sections that are unfinished and things we are fixing, but the basic functionality is stable enough to start testing.

Please have a look around, and let me know what you think and any bugs you find.

Thanks!

It's been quite a bit since my last post; I've been making more small updates via our twitter and facebook. But I did want to give an update on our web development.

This past month I've been working a ton on the new site. Development had stalled for a while for lack of resources.  The good news is that things are moving forward again. I met with Ciplex and went over our remaining needs. We now have a new project manager named Ramin, and a set of new developers (Alex and Slava) focusing on our project. Together, the new team has been making a ton of progress.

I wanted to give a brief update on our web development, which, just between you and me, continues to be the most time-consuming and frustrating part of this project.

What was estimated to take three months has now taken over a year, and still isn't finished. How is that possible you may wonder? Well, it is one of the results of not having enough money to pay for the true costs; short on money means long on time.

One of the ways we are saving money is by building our site using Drupal, an open source content management platform. Drupal is great, but there have been a lot of unforeseen complications in building some of our custom functionality. This ate up programming hours and resources, and has caused a lot of delays. Development has been stuttering, moving forward in spurts, and at times, idling.

Here is some video of my pitch to Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman, two of my favorite filmmakers. I was super nervous at the time, but they were both super cool. We shot this with a little mini-dv, no lights, and no mics, so  lighting and sound aren't so good. But honestly, I'm happy we were able to get any of this on video.

Hey everyone, I just got off the phone with Ilya and our web team at Ciplex, and there has been a lot of progress to report. Lauren has been knocking off bugs, they have been fixing IE browser issues all last week, and we are getting ready for a final big push to compile and deal with the remaining fixes.

Over the next 48 hours, Ciplex will be doing internal quality testing and bug fixing. Tonight, I'm putting together an itemized list of things I've noticed that still need fixing. After they take a crack at fixing bugs internally, there will be one more round of quality checking on my part, 3 developers will fix what is reasonable, and then we will open the new site up for beta testing.