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HEAD TO Hellman

Some key features are missing (pledging, promotions) but the site lets you make a list of books you’ll support for “ungluing”. You can’t really plan for a launch. Things always happen, you do not expect. Our first unexpected event was that Library Journal ran a bit about our “soft start” on their Digital Shift website, while we were along the way of deploying the web site to creation.

They didn’t connect to us but a few impatient readers typed in the website name and started exercising the website before we were finished examining the deployment. Nothing awful happened. Thanks, Dave, and go! Then Google spidered the site, exposing a couple of errors. We desired our email list subscribers to be the first to see our work, on Thursday night and we finally delivered the email.

List readers uncovered that our “popular” and “unglued” views were operating very very gradually, loading down the website. Raymond studied the problem, and, as seems to happen so with Django often, found the answer concealed in plain view (the paperwork). After moving some nested questions, the pages came back 100x faster. The miracles of EC2 allowed us to spin up a more impressive server to assist with load. And the high insert from the glacial concerns helped expose some concurrency problems that we never could have found in a million years of normal operation.

  • Geared towards files instead of tasks
  • What is the Franchise Fee
  • Print proofs
  • Central location
  • C – Call-only ads don’t appear on mobile devices

Or so says the errant coder- me. We wanted to open the website when we do so that we could show our work to your many friends at the American Library Association Midwinter meeting in Dallas. So on Friday, I got up at 5AM (after bugfixing till 1AM) to catch an airline flight. I didn’t have any coffee therefore I could sleep on the aircraft.

When I attained my Dallas hotel, I found out another unexpected incident: I needed left my laptop on the airplane. Before reading another paragraph, check your laptop, your iPad, your kindle, your nook, or whatever. It looks plain probably, like mine (left). If there is no identification on it, go get one of those free address brands you got from the Awful Disease Foundation, and stick it on. Also, some stickers from your preferred organizations.

When you are done, it should look like @vmbrasseur’s (right). Here’s what I learned all about lost MacBook Pros and airlines. Once the electric battery operates away, you can’t even find a serial number. The typical baggage claim operation doesn’t have the geek squad backup. They don’t really have extra power cords or batteries to help them ID lost laptop computers.

What they DO have is a safe, and that is where errant laptops go to pass away. When you are in my position ever, go to the airport and have the friendly lost-luggage attendant to visit try looking in the safe. Otherwise, you will never again see your laptop, even though you have got into its serial quantity into the web form that has changed the lost and found contact number that nobody helpful ever answers. In contrast, Jeanette, the DFW Continental Airlines baggage declare professional that I talked to in person, was very helpful.

She called back again to the guy with the safe, and we barely had time to joke about the huge handbag of dried fish from Africa that was smelling up the lost baggage area before safe-guy came out with MY Laptop. THEREFORE I was feeling pretty good. The in-person demos are a great complement to submitted feedback reports because they enable you to see expectation mismatch as well as outright failures.

Andromeda appeared to have the demonstration drill down to research. I am thankful for the generosity of our in-person testers, whose insights will soon be integrated into the site. Since this post has been accepting digressions, I must note that Andromeda provides new meanings to the adjective “awesome” here.

At some point over the past few months, probably due to insufficient proper supervision in conjunction with web development despair, Andromeda has learned to code JavaScript and CSS. In a subsequent amount of inadequate supervision, Andromeda appears to have recruited a squadron of librarians learning to code, which is somehow becoming an official ALA “codeyear” Interest Group. I question that people have noticed the last of this.