News Update.
A warm welcome to our very first newsletter. We have some exciting news for you. The sysadmins at Server Circle have been mind-blowingly busy !
We're close to finishing two Apps for your smartphones: an Android App and an iPhone App ! If you're thinking that's not really kept you that busy then read on.
We've also completely rewritten the Server Circle site ! Yes, okay, the site looks pretty much the same but behind the scenes it's been completely re-written from scratch, by hand. That's about 3200 lines of (lovingly sworn at) code to you and me. For the duration of coding the Apps and re-coding the site we've calculated that we: caused one unnecessary server reboot, dropped and broke one laptop, generated eight hundred and seventeen Error 404s, twelve Error 500s and renounced PHP three times. Now that's commitment.
I see you baby, shaking that App.
Frequent users of Server Circle can already check for new questions using RSS and Twitter and soon you'll be able to check for any new questions with an Android App and an iPhone App too ! The Apps will be very simple, automatically refreshing the latest five questions but it means you don't need a browser open and it shouldn't juice your phone's battery or take up much RAM at all. You'll be able to share the question's link via the usual methods too. Initially we were thinking of just publishing the Apps on the site and not in the App Store or Android Market but it looks like only jailbroken iPhones support that. If anyone has a developer account and they would kindly upload our phone App we'd be most grateful ! If you're an App aficionado and you think we can just link to the Apps on our site then please let us know at contact -without-spamming-us @ servercircle.com. In fact, you can contact us at that address for anything Server Circle related.
What rewrite ? The site looks exactly the same !
Without naming names (okay, it was entirely Mike's fault) we were getting increasingly annoyed with the way the original site was built and because of the "defects" in the codebase it meant that whenever a small change to the site was needed it would cause other problems. After the rewrite the site's significantly faster (and achieving 99/100 using Google's PageSpeed in some tests), it's much more secure and now completely written in good old PHP running on MySQL; meaning that as we add more features to the site in the future it should be much less painful.
Some new simple features added during the rewrite were: emails are sent to whomever asked the question as answers are submitted, we've ditched avatar uploads and gone with Gravatar (old avatars still work) and you can edit your question without looking through the list of all your questions held under your Account. We're also trying out MailChimp's mailing list service (if you haven't noticed already !) for our every-now-and-again newsletters.
Adieu and thank you.
That's almost all from us. A quick doff of our cap to user "_SteveWilson_" who is currently top of the Server Circle Leaderboard by miles. Steve must have helped loads of people with technical problems since the site launched in Beta on the 30th of April. Well done also to user "s" who isn't doing at all badly either. On behalf of the community, thanks to you both for all your help !
We'll be sending a brief email out when the Apps are ready. In the meantime thanks for being part of the Server Circle community.
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