Back in 30 minutes….lunch.

Website Down, a story of epic fail and glorious recovery

Back in 30 minutes….lunch.

This is a quote from a Bluehost employee in the middle of a live chat support session with me.  Ponder the ridiculousness of that idea, and you’ll start to understand what kind of emotionally-excruciating experience it was trying to get our website back up, a pain which is best expressed through the webcam photo of myself below.  This was all thanks to carefully following the directions Blogger gave me to set up our former Blogger blog to redirect to our new website.  Obviously, in our case, it didn’t quite work.

While it’s true that I caused the site to go down in the first place, the site was only supposed to be down for a couple hours.  However, due to our DNS configuration not getting changed back to exactly the same way it was before I caused this whole debacle, the site was down for an extra 24 hours.

And this whole experience is a perfect example of when giving less control to your users, because you think you know what’s best for them, isn’t always the best solution.

From what I could gather, Bluehost has to change the DNS config themselves because they don’t like hearing people complain about screwing up their own websites.  So they decided to give less control to people and change the DNS stuff themselves.  However, due to the nature of remote technical support - possibly one of the worst things ever in the history of mankind - a very human mistake was made by a Bluehost employee and our DNS config wasn’t changed completely back to its original state.

This represents the pains of tech support.  Both for the staff, and the customer!

This kept our website down until the same tech that I’ve quoted in this title did something to help solve the problem:  he gave me more control!  He did this by giving me more information and by assuming that I could understand it.  He pasted the exact DNS configuration of our website to me.  I noticed that the address for our webserver was not pointing to what it should be and asked him about it.  He noted that it was likely a problem, but in order to solve it I had to contact Bluehost in a specific way for them to change it.

So I contacted them, asking essentially “Isn’t this the problem? Plus I can’t even get the website using the IP.”  And they told me why I couldn’t get the website working using the IP, not mentioning anything about the problem I was asking about.  So I waited.  Still down.  Then I did something I’m sure every tech support staff member hates:  I didn’t shut up.  “The site is still down, just wanted you know, I’ll keep you updated, etc”  But then shortly after that, someone else noticed hey, the problem is this, which was the exact problem I previously mentioned, recorded in text just posts above.  Man, I feel just terrible for Bluehost.  Remote tech support is the worst thing ever.  Really it is.  But the whole thing could have been much less painful if I would have been the one changing things, so I could know what was changed and change it back if things went wrong.

Thankfully, we’re back up and things are good.  Enjoy the new site!

UNIQLOCK - Viral Marketing At Its Best

This is a fantastic example of viral marketing for a polo shirt company. It’s a clock with spliced clips of well-choreographed dancing and incredibly catchy lounge/bebop music all timed to match the ticking.

I’d love to come up with such a good example myself. Hmm…

Creating a Pitch Is Hard

So we’re creating a pitch to submit to Adult Swim. Before you get too confused, it’s for a video game, not a show. The pitch has to be 2 pages, which seems like plenty. However, for describing something as complicated as a game, it’s surpisingly difficult. We’ve found the trick is to just glaze over everything. It sounds simple I know, but if you’re excited about an idea and want to share that with someone else, your first instinct is to describe all the exciting details. Instead, you’ve got to try to be short and sweet.

Well, there’s a fine line between short & concise and short & confusing. Not only that, it’s a pitch, which means it needs to sell. How to do you explain a game mechanic in a concise way and make it sound exciting? I don’t really think you can. With our pitch, we’ve settled for starting out with a more humorous tone, then transitioning into a clear explanation of the game. Every once in a while, some witty phrases are sprinkled in. Will it work? We’ll find out in about a week.

Does anyone have any pitch experience or advice?

To Share or Not To Share

So I was talking to Andres about marketing yesterday. I’ve been debating a lot about whether or not it would be a good idea to share a lot of the development process with the community. This would include posting WIP stuff. We both agreed that most people don’t understand WIP postings. Because of this, it’s a risky thing to do marketing-wise. But you know, I think that’s why I want to do it. I think it would be cool to try to educate the community about game development. This would include showing people what game development looks like in-process. If we could educate even one future producer that it’s ok for a game to look a bit ugly in the early stages, I think it’d be well worth it. And think of how great it would be to educate current producers that it’s ok! Plus, I still think the advantages of being open and allowing the community to form a closer relationship with the development team would greatly outweigh the disadvantages of people who are uneducated about game development thinking the game sucks while it’s still a WIP.

Another cool thing about sharing development process is that people will get to see how the product is evolving while it is evolving. I think this could create a more emotional attachment to the project, which would result in people being more interested in it.