The Robot Co-op

Hi Everyone, hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Sorry we’ve been so quiet recently, we’re working on a new, top-secret website that we think many of you are going to enjoy.

Just wanted to give everyone a heads up about a maintenance event that will require a brief downtime on each of our websites this weekend. The schedule will be (all times in Pacific Time):

43things.com 2011-12-09 17:00 – 2011-12-09 17:30
43places.com 2011-12-09 18:30 – 2011-12-09 22:30
allconsuming.net and listsofbests.com 2011-12-10 20:30 – 2011-12-10 21:00

Each site should only be down for a few minutes, but we give a larger window just in case something weird happens or things go slower than expected.

Sorry for the downtime. We try to keep these few and far between. The times were chosen by our hosting provider so they’re unfortunately what we have to work with.

Happy Holidays!

Sorry for the delay in fixing the interaction issues plaguing users of IE9. Our little secret here at the Robot Co-op is that we don’t have any Windows computers! (We do have a malfunctioning laptop that has a note reading “IE6″ taped to it). Kathy was kind enough to bring in her rubenesque windows laptop for testing.

We’re happy to say that all known IE9 bugs are gone. The most frustrating was the inability to re-order the goals on your profile page.

Find any other bugs on our websites that are specific to IE9? Speak up now before Kathy takes her laptop back home!

Blogger Martha Rotter took a look at the goal-setting behavior on 43 Things and made a few interesting graphs.

In her words:

I took the list of top 100 all-time goals and list of top 100 achieved goals and merged them to see where the over­laps are, where the gaps are, and if there is a cor­rel­a­tion between pop­u­lar goals set and pop­u­lar goals achieved.

Here are the most challenging goals to complete (based on the number of people who have adopted them but not marked them as complete):

The rest of the charts, along with some insightful analysis and tips on effective goal-setting, can be found here:

http://martharotter.com/blog/index.php/2011/08/fun-with-data-goal-setting/

Thanks, Martha!

We don’t mind having many irons in the fire at once. At the same time we were working on the lag bug, we’ve also been experimenting with an infrastructure change to speed up our websites.¹ Yesterday, we rolled it out for Lists of Bests, All Consuming, and 43 Places. Today, we just flipped the switch for 43 Things.

We’re already seeing anecdotal performance improvements. In other words, the websites are moving like Greased Lightning! As with any changes, there may be some lingering bugs, so please let us know if you see anything amiss.

¹ Nerd info: we moved our memcache to Amazon’s ElastiCache, part of AWS.

We just tweaked the look of the 43 Things homepage (for signed-in users). Instead of a link for “cheering”, there’s a nifty orange button. We hope this will encourage people to use their cheers! We’re also testing the new cheer buttons in a few other places around the site, see if you can find them…

Let us know what you think. Do they get you to use cheers more often? If you already use your cheers, do you think they’ll entice new users to do likewise? Do they get in the way? Do you want the buttons to be even bigger?! Just kidding.

In unrelated news, we may have a fix that improves the “lag time” bug that is plaguing the site! Check it out and see if the lag time is eliminated or at least reduced. Let us know what you find, especially if you’re still seeing lag (please be specific in your feedback if you see lag, e.g. what is the URL of the page where you see it). Thanks for your patience on this one!

It’s a Robot tradition to send a photo of yourself to the office when you go on vacation. But it has to be set up just right… Here’s one of Josh in Hawaii, see if you can figure out the rules.

Here’s what Joe sent home during his road trip to Yellowstone.

Anyone else have (or had) interesting summer plans? Send us a photo of your shoes on vacation and we’ll post the best ones!

Sorry to report we’re having an unplanned outage of the 3 sites named above, starting about 3 hours ago. We’re working on bringing them back up and will update this post when work is complete.

Update: Service has been restored to all sites. There was no loss of data. Our apologies for the long downtime.

http://www.43places.com
http://www.allconsuming.net
http://www.listsofbests.com

Don't sneeze!

We came back to life about 4 hours ahead of schedule. Woot! We pretty much had a complete overhaul & transformation this morning (all on the back-end). So we wouldn’t be surprised if we turn up a few snags over the next day or two.

If you do see something wonky on the site, the best way to tell us about it is to send us mail at “bugs” at robotcoop.com.

Thanks

43 Things will be temporarily offline for a site update on Monday, June 13, 2011, starting at 6 am PDT (GMT -7) and lasting most of the work day. It’s difficult to give an accurate estimate of the duration of the outage, but we’ll be back up as soon as possible.  We’re putting a reminder message at the top of every page in case you forget (or don’t read the blog).  We try to keep long site outages like this one to an absolute minimum, and we apologize in advance for the interruption of service.