If the message from our beta testers said anything, it said, “simplify things some more”. Of course, life being what it was, simplifying also means more complicated. The problem with putting everything you might want all within easy reach is that you pretty much end up putting everything within easy …

Time for a developer ramble about the state of things here at Author Buzz UK, bug tracking, progress, and article length. Solving Bugs We reported that a potential bug had been found with sign-ups. Thanks to some truly amazing beta testers we have found that there probably is no bug …

Right in the middle of NaNoWriMo, the server got the hiccups. First, the blogs stopped responding. Then the main site went down. I did what any stressed dev might do and restarted the server. Bad mistake! The MySQL server refused to come back up. Just totally refused. After some time …

We have identified a possible fault with the sign-up process for Author Buzz. It only affects people signing up with email but not with WordPress.com. The fault appears to be that the email for new accounts never arrives. Sometimes. Possibly. Problems like this are a nightmare to debug because they do …

We’ve put our dev blog on a news footing. As part of our efforts to make sure that blog beta users get a great selection of themes, we have updated the dev blog with a new theme. While this might not be the most exciting news in the world, it …

We’ve been adding a bunch of new stuff to Author Buzz. A lot of it is hidden away in preparation for launching an awesome set of new features but some of it is available for general use right now. New QnA forum for writers Writer’s help – a QnA forum for …

Everything should be working again but I managed to break everything quite badly today. First I installed a new plugin which ended up causes a network-wide server error. I then disabled all plugins which was a bit of a sledgehammer approach. After I removed the broken plugin, I had to …

In case you thought we had all upped sticks and vanished without a trace. Here is a general update on Author Buzz. The focus of the team has of late been divided into two broadly equal categories. Participating and establishing the community Coping with the heat Content Updates Now that …

We can finally announce some forward progress in the area of modifying member profiles to do what we need them to do. This is almost entirely down to one man who I have never met.

With a little luck, the site(s) should now be a little bit faster. For those of you who are interested let’s look at how we made Author Buzz a bit faster. Pretty much most of the speed improvements have come from installing W3 Total Cache. Despite my reservations, it seems …