July In Short - RP Repository

Posted by Kim on July 29, 2011, 11:18am

Hey gang!

Here's what's happened this month:

Stand back, I'm going to try Science!
Where've I been?
Forum Chat gets wise
EPIC USERS: User profile customization
New templates for this month

Stand back, I'm going to try Science!
Science of course being the careful testing of a hypothesis in a controlled test to see if I'm right.

Last month we moved to our very own virtual server. Inside this walled bastion, where the vagaries of our neighbors could no longer shut us down, one thing became abundantly clear. We had created some monsters. Yes, a few of our programs were on the over enthusiastic side, and were generating their own little lag bombs when they got too excited.

But now that we are isolated, it means that lag testing can be meaningful. The results aren't tainted by outside noise -- problems can be found, targeted, and destroyed, one by one. I've spent most of this month crawling around inside the intertubes, setting up tests and leaving behind traps to capture lag for study. Some of these investigations (mostly of complex interaction problems) are still under way. Others have already been addressed, and the average response time for the site is slowly lowering. I don't know about you, but I love a speedy site!

You'll be hearing back soon!
While page response times have been falling, my correspondence time has been rising. Aside from my laser-guided obsession with making the site perform at its best, I had an unusually strange and busy month in regards to my day job.

As many of you know, I work full time hours (and then some) in addition to the full time hours I put in on the RPR, and this month was worse than many others. As a result, I got a little lax about responding to your emails and bug reports. Everything got read, and things that were critically important got acted on, but not everything was responded to as quickly as it should have been.

Over the next week, I plan to catch up with everything that has been sent in. If you don't hear from me, please feel free to re-send your questions.

Thanks for bearing with me! That I'm not always around to help can be frustrating, but holding another job not only keeps food on my table, it keeps the RPR's server fees paid and the site online.

Forum chat gets wise
As part of the No More Lag initiative, the chat was tweaked and fine tuned, and in the process gained some nice features.

The best is that the chat is now ultra-careful with your work. The beautiful prose you've created is carefully protected while the chat talks to the server and double checks that the post is successfully put into the database before it blanks the text area. If some error occurs on the server, or you suddenly lose your internet connection, you won't lose the effort you put into a RP post. You can just save the post and try again later.

Here's what one of our mobile users had to say:

"I was just out getting yet more supplies for my costume. On the way back, I was using my phone with the chat (first time I've tried it actually) and as I moved into an area where there was no reception, the chat saved my message and sent it once I had a clear signal again."

SUCCESS.

There've also been a few cosmetic changes as well. The "send" button now responds visually when it is clicked, the textarea is greyed out, and a loading indicator appears. Previously, clicking the button caused the program to begin talking to the server immediately, but it was silent. You might not know whether you'd successfully clicked or not. Having a visual indicator removes a surprising amount of stress from the experience.

EPIC USERS: User Profile Customization
To thank those people who help to keep the RP Repository alive and well, it is now possible for them to create custom looks for their own profiles.

If you're an epic member:

Go to your dashboard
Pick "Your Profile."
Look under "Your Style."
Checking the box should yield an editor. Just point and click on what you want to change.
Remember to save when you've got it looking the way you want with the button underneath the editing pane.

New templates for this month
In case you missed it, July 20th was the 42nd anniversary of the moonlanding. To celebrate, we released three new templates: