DA&D UK Metro + Big Updates

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 had at least 150 new producers join from the UK via the article, helping us pass 12,000 Producers, and raise over $1,500 for our production!

download a PSD of this article

Funds raised by the UK Metro article helped us buy much needed harddrives and RAM for editing our documentary. BIG THANKS to all of our new crew who signed up and chipped in, and thanks to the folks at DA&D for the article!

Meanwhile, I've been working with our development team at Ciplex to finish our new site. We did some beta testing, and have fixed over 200 bugs. We're now down to the last 4 bugs to fix!

The remaining challenge for launching the site will be to import all of our crew data. In addition to the data import, we also need to optimize our Drupal site caching and correctly configure our server to handle potential traffic spikes. The last time we launched a site, we ended up on the homepage of digg.com, and our servers crashed. Hoping to avoid that this time. The good news is that the Drupal experts at Lullabot are going to help consult our web team. Lullabot has a lot of experience with setting up high traffic Drupal sites, so it will be a huge help to get their guidance.We have a conference call Thursday.

Finally, there has been lots of progress on the new teaser video we have been putting together. We had a sound design session donated at KeepMePosted, and are now working with Cirque du Soleil composer Jean-François Côté, who is creating some original music for the new teaser. 

So a lot is coming together. Hopefully we will be ready to launch the site in a week. Just a heads up, but we may have to shut the live site down for 24 hours as we transfer the data and get the new site up.

Best to all,

n