This a no brainer Mark you noob
It turns out you have to setup everything the right way or your service will crash like a dominos champion display.
This week Victus Media’s search and personalized ad tool was either dysfunctional or down. I had been happily hosting the plugin here for a few weeks so people could explore and try out our service. We had some major overhauls in data and function and have learned a little about stability. But every minute the server was down or the database empty I imagined a lost potential user. If you think about up time in this way, it really hurts to have your site down (like a kick in the groin). I want nothing more than for users to sample our site and think, “whoa!”, and this week that wasn’t close to happening.
While I was wrestling with wubi/ubuntu and finally virtualbox (darn tiny Linux window) our server was effectively dead to the outside world. We have hashed out a solution for future problems, and me having a mirror of our server environment running locally should help identify and resolve some issues before they make it to our live server. So far I’ve been chasing a good mirror of our server code (lead tech Tyler is always busy) and had some issues doing that in windows with rails. We need to do more testing on concurrent users as well as improving functionality. Later on we can work on a redundant server backup that kicks in if we have any load or technical issues.
Site Stability
Any user feedback design methodology depends on usage to drive design decisions. Without usage, new functional elements have little rationale for being developed beyond instincts and hunches. While design doesn’t require outside direction initially, it surely benefits from the knowledge gained from user habits, and expectations. If 99/100 new visitors all love a particular element, you would be wise to maintain and even expand that function, as long as it doesn’t break what users like about it.
User Trust and Bug Smashing
The best way to gain user and customer trust is to be reliable. If your service can stand up to a dedicated denial of service attack (beyond Google spiders 
), with only mild delays then you’re in the golden zone.
If normal usage breaks your system, then you have to react fast to squash any bugs. The greater the number of users for your service, the larger the test base. A divergent set of browsers, systems and expectations all work in unison to transform a concept into a sturdy and resilient product.
The quicker you can move your service from flakey to trustworthy, the sooner you can expand.
“Without usage, new functional elements have little rationale for being developed beyond instincts and hunches.”
Your overall point is correct – usage and actual usability should drive future design and development decisions. But at the starting point, the rationale of an initial design should be based on the experience of a designer or developer. An experienced interface or usability designer doesn't operate on hunches. Instincts are formed through study of best practices and user research. With experience your starting point is not a shot in the dark or a hunch.
You can make up for inexperience by taking advantage of beta testing BEFORE you launch. All teams should test, no matter what, and pay attention to the user's experience. But don't just do it after you launch. Testing is a constant. The work is never done – especially on the web.
Great feedback Mike. As I'm new to web development much of my “instincts” are a transition from 14 years of desktop c++ coding algorithms and simulations.
Basic functional elements transfer over, but where the user was me and 3-4 other engineers before, now the potential user base has become unlimited. From the nuances of web software (so many languages, tools, and such a different environment), to the practicalities of implementing concepts in a scalable way (data, memory, where apps run either client or server), I find that I much to learn each day I work in this space.
Now to find where our project is kept on the server (my first time getting down and dirty since it was hanging up, and the tech lead is sleeping).
What is this personalized ad tool, Mark, and how can it help get the word out for a site like ShortScreen? E.g., could it help me find more potential affiliates?
Not sure it's something that could find affiliates, but it's possible they'd show up in real time searches of related tags (if you know the triggering topics/terminology you may have better luck manually searching).
When the site is running smoothly (we had a rough week) there are a couple
of basic functions.
Users who log in get a history of their recent semantic tags. We have had varying luck with automated tagging, we use Zemanta and Orchestr8's AlchemyAPI and have a long way to go in improving accuracy. Then a user can view this tag cloud and fire off a real time search by clicking to see who else is talking about the same concepts/ideas. In addition, and this could be a very strong value point, users can view their lists as tag clouds to quickly scan for topics of interest. One of the issues we have now is using category or high level tags versus specific tags. Both could be useful (one for more specific search, one for better clustering of like messages).
On the ad side anyone can install a plugin that users can opt into with their Twitter account using oauth. The ads are them dynamically matched to keywords or tags associate with the history of that account.
What is this personalized ad tool, Mark, and how can it help get the word out for a site like ShortScreen? E.g., could it help me find more potential affiliates?
Not sure it's something that could find affiliates, but it's possible they'd show up in real time searches of related tags (if you know the triggering topics/terminology you may have better luck manually searching).
When the site is running smoothly (we had a rough week) there are a couple
of basic functions.
Users who log in get a history of their recent semantic tags. We have had varying luck with automated tagging, we use Zemanta and Orchestr8's AlchemyAPI and have a long way to go in improving accuracy. Then a user can view this tag cloud and fire off a real time search by clicking to see who else is talking about the same concepts/ideas. In addition, and this could be a very strong value point, users can view their lists as tag clouds to quickly scan for topics of interest. One of the issues we have now is using category or high level tags versus specific tags. Both could be useful (one for more specific search, one for better clustering of like messages).
On the ad side anyone can install a plugin that users can opt into with their Twitter account using oauth. The ads are them dynamically matched to keywords or tags associate with the history of that account.
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