Archive for the 'website' Category
April 5th, 2008 by torncanvas
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!
April 3rd, 2008 by aeiowu
Shhhh… We’re Alpha Testing, don’t tell anyone!
This wee bug was no “gomez” or “zaphod” but he certainly was a worthy $@%#ing adversary. BG Bug, we salute you and pray for your safe return to Hades.
We opened the doors to private alpha testing on the Kongregate forums on April fools day. Some we’re skeptical, but the rest were excited. So far only a handful of dedicated troops are testing the game now, and doing a great job of finding bugs galore. The experience has been a little overwhelming, but totally awesome at the same time. The response to the game has been better than we expected, and we’re looking forward to having more fun with it as we open the doors even wider.
Willian Gallis, a writer from KongBR (A Brazilian Kongregate blog) has written a Portuguese article on the Dinowaurs alpha. He’s an alpha tester. Luckily I have a few latin-language friends who helped me read the comments, we hope Brazil has plenty of fun, we tried to make it as globally accessible as possible.
If you are one of the OG testers that sent us an email last year, don’t worry you’ll be in on things soon enough, we’re sending you out special invites today sometime and then we’ll get you fixed up with some delicious dino-ing. We’ve found Kongregate’s chat and bug reports to be invaluable
throughout this process, and we’re really excited with the progress
even after a couple of days. Here’s a shot of the alpha, to whet your palette.
We only have 4 players playing right now (5PM CST) but tonight that should rise with a big load of new invites. Great job testers! (Maybe we can find a better “team name” for “the testers,” post something in the forums guys.
One final note, we’ve been getting some questions on the Kongregate forums about if the people who signed up last year will be getting invites too. Don’t worry your invite is in the mail, you just need to send us your Kongregate UserID in an email. Thanks for sticking with us, and enjoy your dino-ing.
Website Engaged (fiancé-kind)
Sorry Blogger, Wordpress has been flirting with us and she finally broke up with her boyfriend, so we did what any indie nerd would do. Propose marriage.
The website isn’t completely perfect just yet, (nobody is, we learned that in our college relationships) but it’s functional and way easier for us to manage and keep updated. Flash was another girlfriend of ours (in websites) and she was really hard to talk to, things got complicated. Now we have the best of both worlds and hopefully the wedding goes well, you’re all invited!
August 24th, 2007 by torncanvas
In preperation for the future, and as an unfortunate necessity, we got together on Wednesday to go over business stuff and set up some things for a press kit. Part of the press kit was a group photo, so we tried to have as much fun as possible having a photo shoot. Here are some of the results:
(From left: Greg W, Ted M, Mike B, Josh L)
We found a sweet beat-up VW Minibus that had been sitting in that spot for the last 10 years. Of course we wanted to get our picture taken with it. While we were taking pictures, a man who worked at the car shop nearby offered to sell it to us. It needed more love than we were willing to give it, though.
The day before, Mike was showing us the iconic James Bond poses that each Bond actor had adopted. It was really entertaining. Randomly, someone mentioned we should strike a Bond pose, so because we’re dorks, we gave it a shot. This is probably our favorite photo of the whole group.
We figured the abandoned factory would be a great setting for our photos. So this photo is meant to show it off. My favorite part is the fact that every vehicle in the background is at least 10-15 years old. It makes me think of Eastern Europe.
Not an official press photo per se, but appropriate enough anyway. Currently, only Mike lives in Ames, and since that’s where we met, we crashed at his place. It was unseasonably cool that night, so Ted and I wrapped up in our blankets. We looked pretty silly, and that inspired a group photo with all of us snuggled up on the couch.
There’s still debate about these two. We all admit they’re kind of rock-band-pretentious, but the debate is over whether that can be a good thing or not. 
Our lawyer told us that apparently, it’s a good idea for legal reasons to have official titles for your LLC. Something about the government and documents, blah blah blah…
Well at Intuition Games, we see ourselves as equals, with no person having authority over anyone else. It’s just that different people have different roles they take on. We applied that mentality to choosing official titles by drawing names out of Ted’s trumpet case to decide who would get which title. And we forced Ted to play his trumpet between each draw. 
Ted is well-known for his creative genius when it comes to seating posture. If there was ever a competition for most interesting position while working at a computer, Ted would win hands down. Here’s a good example:
Despite some draining business discussions, the whole thing was quite fun. Maybe someday the press photos will actually be put to use. Nah…
June 8th, 2007 by fucrate
He kids, thanks for tuning in. I just got done biking around Ames, which is pretty much all I have to do on a Friday night, and decided to update you guys on the current situation. I know you’re all as anxious to hear how our pitch is going over with the Adult Swim guys as we are and I just wanna let you know that USPS is totally worthless, consider this my formal declaration of independence from that government run shit-house. We sent the package on 2 day mail Monday and still have not received notification of delivery. Ted is progressing nicely with the sculpey-dino and we are definitely NOT using USPS. Though I don’t really believe the $352.88 Sonic-Air option is necessary per-se, I do know we’ll be taking our business far, far away from the government lackeys.
In other news, the website is totally, and I may alienate some of our readers by saying this but I must, pimp. If you haven’t checked it out in a while I suggest you stop by and see what’s up, its more than just growing grass and ’shrooms now as I’ve gotten around to implementing some neat pop-up stuff and thumbnails with Greg’s help on the visual aspect. We still maintain the data-driven model, so if anyone else ever gets the gumption to mess with the layout, as Greg and Josh has already done a bit on the team page, they may do it with a limited amount of XML experience and without needing to stomach the horror of reading any of my “codes”. In reality I am disgusted with the actual “codes” controlling the website, as it’s just a mash-up of various pieces of functionality, each one tacked onto the previous iteration. To put it simply, it is the embodiment of feature-creep despite its development time being limited to about two and a half weeks.
At the very least I recommend you check out the back page for our new thumbnail implementation, it was fun to create and we are featuring a brand new artist who joined the team despite him already being the main programmer. I drew some concept art of what I considered to be the best day ever and it just so happened to involve dinosaurs fighting with high powered weaponry while villagers streamed about them in some fanciful representation of worship. Almost like some kind of war… Maybe a Dinowaur?
May 24th, 2007 by aeiowu
Even though we’re further down the road with development of both the game and the identity/website, I thought it would be neato to post the “mother ship” pdf of all the logo ideas for the intuition identity. Some are good, some are bad and others are just pieces of a larger good/bad logo; you decide!
