We Endure

I don’t even want to guess how long it’s been since I’ve made actually functionality additions to the site, so I won’t even try. But at long last, the dry spell is over, and as you hopefully have noticed, the homepage has changed to be much more friendly and helpful! Now when you’re logged in you are greeted with a display of what’s new in the site for you. This will include any new messages you’ve received, any new comments on your activities, any new comments on events you’re attending and any new posts/comments in groups you’re a member of. (I should mention there’s a slight chance the homepage will break if you were logged in before I made the changes tonight, if you’re getting errors trying to view the homepage, try closing your browser, reopening it and logging in again.)  In addition, the site news is more prominently featured, so when new things are added it should be much more obvious. And…speaking of new things, did you notice that you can now buy some fancy We Endure Merchandise? Who doesn’t love merchandise? No one, that’s who!

So, now that the dry spell has ended I’d like to take a little time to go over the additions I’ve got planned for the site in the (near?) future. The first of which will be the long awaited, and oft-requested ability to extend the attributes available for a given activity type. What exactly does this mean you ask? Well, for most people, the default attributes are plenty (or even too much if you’re a cyclist and not tracking Heart Rate), but for those of you who are really serious about your training, you’ll have the ability to create any field you desire, be it Calories Burned, Lap Split Times, Maximum Power Output, Temperate, you name it! On top of that, I’ll also be adding a Weightlifting activity which will make great use of the new flexibility in attributes so one person can have a Bench Press attribute with 10 reps at 100lbs, and someone else can have 15 reps at 150lbs. Whee! There’s no concrete date as to when this functionality will come (I haven’t done much more than sketch it out yet), but it’s officially *next*.

After that’s done, the other things I’ve got in the pipeline are to redesign the User-bar navigation so it’s not so confusing/doesn’t suck, Expand the Goals section so you can mark goals as complete (and view completed goals), Expand the Gear section so you can add much more detailed information (to allow for things like tracking when to replace your running shoes, or the chain on your bike). Past that, I don’t have any concrete plans, although there’s tons of stuff I’d like to implement (like an XBox360 style achievement system!), but let’s work with this stuff first and see where that gets us!

As always, if you notice a problem with the site or there’s something you’d like to see added, feel free to email me (joshua@weendure.com), or post it to the We Endure Suggestions group.

So I’m in the process of looking at alternative hosting options, but in the meantime I’ve had the site moved to a less utilized server at my hosting provider, in theory this should help to alleviate the intermittent site outages in the short term.  In the long term I’m sure this server will become more utilized over time, and as such will eventually display the same performance issues we’ve been seeing the past few months.  On the bright side this should afford us a good window to find a more reliable host.

Having trouble with the ol’ hosting provider again.  Trying to get a response from them.  More to follow.

Well, at least that was a quick fix.  I think my prior statements about my frozen version of Rails not being used were incorrect (which explains why the site was running so much better than I expected it would under Rails 1.2.2).  The actual problem was my hosting provider had also installed a new version of one of tool I was using to facilitate tagging entries which wasn’t playing nicely with the rest of the site.  Once I explicitly told it to use the previous version all was well.

If anyone notices any further problems feel free to post here, email me, send up a flare, etc.

So, here’s the thing.  When running in a shared hosting environment it’s recommended that you “freeze” your rails install, that way, when the hosting provider changes the version or rails, there’s no danger of differences in the versions causing any unforeseen side effects in your application.  That’s the theory anyway.  My hosting provider has just upgraded to the latest version of Ruby on Rails (1.2.2), and for some reason, even though I had frozen my install to the previous version (1.1.6) the site has still gone and exploded itself.

On the bright side, it’s actually working much better than I expected it would under 1.2.2, but some (rather important) things are definitely broken.  Most prominently, anything involving tagging activities is throwing errors.  This means anyone who has used tags on their activities won’t be able to access their user page at all.  I’m actively looking into the problem and hope to figure out a solution ASAP.  Will let you know more as soon as I know more.