Blog Friends v1 Beta Update

And now, for an update from a techy’s point of view…

Yesterday, our hosting provider, XCalibre, was still working hard recovering from a major outage, caused by a power spike. It took a little longer than they anticipated, but now all our servers are running fine once more. Unfortunately the Blog Friends v1 Beta test server suffered the longest downtime, but it is now back up and running with the latest Blog Friends code!

The last 4 days have been a frenzy of CSS/FBML/FBJS and PHP coding to polish Blog Friends v1 Beta ready for release on Monday. We are almost there now, with just a few cross browser issues remaining. One of the major issues with writing a Facebook application that heavily utilises the more complicated features of Facebook’s FBML and FBJS is that you cannot, generally, use tried-and-tested solutions to standard browser bugs, such as Internet Explorer’s whitespace and peek-a-boo bugs. For another example from a different browser: don’t try and embed (FB) JS functions in an (FB) Ajax fetched page if you want it to work in Safari - it is not pretty. We do the majority of our development in Firefox due to its excellent debugging extensions, such as Firebug.

Fortunately, the issues with hosting over the last 2 days have not delayed us too much, so we are still on target for a Monday release. All of the major features work in the latest versions of the major browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer 7/6, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, …) all that is left is to fix some cross-browser CSS styling bugs, modify the wording here and there, and give it some major re-testing. I, for one, can’t wait to get v1 Beta released so that I can start really using it in the context of the larger Blog Friends community, rather than just testing it in a closed off development environment!

Due to the major changes in v1 Beta (and massively more advanced functionality compared to the current live version, v0.7) the database has had major structural changes, meaning that we will have to disable Blog Friends on Monday whilst we convert the old database over to the new format and update the code. This process will likely take most of the day, so try and get your Blog Friends fill on Sunday night!

We at i-together apologise in advance for this unavoidable downtime, but we hope that you think the final product is well worth the wait (we certainly do!), and we very much look forward to hearing your feedback on it.

Goodbye, and Happy Blog Friend-ing!