2.5.5: Terms of Use & Privacy Policy

natatkinson    Development, Updates    

Now that SteepleWeb is a public product, we had to have a Terms of Use and Privacy Policy for all of our users to read and agree to (yeah, I know, we weren’t very excited either). So sometime in the next week, all of your users will be asked to update their info and accept our Terms of Use.

This also solves the rare issue of athletes not showing up on the training log leaderboard.  As long as they select a gender when they update their profile, they will show up on the leaderboard even if they didn’t before.

Speaking of the training log, you can now choose Monday or Sunday to be your ‘first day of the week.’ You can set this at a team level, and your users can also select their personal preference as well, but team preference will override user preference on your team site. But the user’s personal preference for ‘first day of the week’ will work when we launch our public training log on steepleweb.com in the near future. This will be a place where anyone can have a training log, whether they are on a team or not. Your users will also have the option to make their training log public on steepleweb.com, so they can share their log if they’d like.

We’ve also removed a step from updating the menu on your sites in the hope that is a bit easier for you. You just need to hit the publish button at the top now when you are ready to have your updates go live.

And in the next couple weeks we will be announcing a new template! This is by far the most exciting news, as our current templates are becoming a bit dated. The new template named ‘Champaign’ (continuing our naming convention of cities) looks very clean and modern. We hope to give you a glimpse of it soon!

Nate, Brad, & Scot

2.5.4 Update

natatkinson    Development, Updates    

Just pushed SteepleWeb Version 2.5.4 out this weekend, with it came a few noticeable changes:

• Datepicker issue fix for users of Chrome
• New styles available for our 2 templates
• New User Types

The new user types is the biggest change and is explained on our new support website.

New Support Website

URL: https://steepleweb.zendesk.com

We have started adding more content to the new support site, so it should be a great place to answer any questions you might have. You can also submit a help ticket from that page, or by emailing support@steepleweb.com. Of course you can continue to email myself and Brad like you have in the past, but by emailing support@steepleweb.com, you should get a faster response, and it will be documented with a ticket!

SteepleWeb Website Is Live!

Anyone can now signup for SteepleWeb, and we are officially out of beta! This is super exciting (Like this kind of excited).  You should check out http://www.steepleweb.com/ when you get a chance.

We will be contacting our current beta teams and letting you know how we will migrate you out of beta. We plan to finish this on December 1st, 2012, so that gives you a few months, and we don’t interrupt your current cross country season. Look for an email from us soon on this.

2.5.3 Update

natatkinson    Development    

Buenas Dias! Just rolled out the 2.5.3 update to SteepleWeb. Its a minor change:

2.5 Update (With a side of downtime)

natatkinson    Development    

After months of work, we are finally ready to move to our new server (that is the basic story, I’ll keep it short as to not bore you). The new server is a monster, and should be able to maintain the hordes of teams that will signup the day we open SteepleWeb up into the wild (at least that’s how we see it in our dreams).

This update comes with a little downtime as we migrate to the new server – but don’t worry, we’ve tossed in a few options to keep you happy. First big improvement you will notice is speed! All the pages (especially the training log) load considerably faster, so the page loading time should be gone. Most other pages on your site will have speed improvements too, so get excited. The next cool new feature is a mobile version of your site. Its version 1 of the SteepleWeb mobile, but its a step in the right-direction. We haven’t integrated the training log on it yet, but thats top on the list.

This new version lays the groundwork for a faster update process – on our list is a re-fitting of the admin panel (badly needed), and the ability to change the style of your site (including a choice between templates – that’s right, we’ve got some new templates headed your way).

The downtime will happen in about a week or so – we will send out another email closer to when the downtime will occur, and of course we will post it on our facebook, twitter, and google+ pages.

Hope everyone’s track & field seasons are getting off to a good start!

Nate, Brad, and Scot

Working on Version 2.5.0

natatkinson    Development     development

We’ve been hard at work over the last couple of months to produce version 2.5.0., and we are excited. Why the excitement? Well, we are using a new Database Manage System, so our database will be much easier for us to work with – which means we can add the features you want faster. Along with that, we’ve done some major code cleanup in the process, so expect things to run faster and smoother.

You faithful users won’t be seeing these updates until we move to the new server though – so there will be a transition period (we hope to make it smooth), but there will be some scheduled downtime. We built the new server a while ago, and we’ve just been getting ready to use it. We’ve got it all configured just the way you’ll like it, fast and full of awesome.

After Version 2.5 is out, we will be revamping steepleweb.com and finally move out of beta – which means that teams will be able to signup and start using SteepleWeb instantly. This also means that SteepleWeb will be a paid product. But don’t worry, our current pricing plans (which are in the works) include a free version – because we are runners too, and part of the goal fo SteepleWeb is to provide a benefit to the running community -and by providing a free version of SW, we can do that.

We’ve given up much over the years (time and financially), so we are very excited to be so close to moving out of beta.

But even more exciting is we’ve added another person to our team: Scot (with one “t”) is our new developer. He is the chosen one that will bring balance to our to-do list by implementing your feature requests. Scot has been working on Version 2.5, but recently started working on a mobile version of SW – so get excited for that.

Keep getting out the door

Nate, Brad & Scot

Scheduled Downtime – 03-02-10 6:45PM

natatkinson    Development     downtime

We just got word today that our data center will have a scheduled outage tomorrow night – here is the skinny from Kansas City:

I regret to inform you that we have scheduled an outage for 03-2-2011 at 7:00PM Central time. The building just informed us that there is a problem with the power coming into the building. Both electricians they hired and Kansas City power and light said it cannot wait to be fixed and requires the power to the entire building to be taken down. They said the power outage should last 30 min

Unfortunately, your SteepleWeb sites will be down – hopefully for less than an hour.

Hope everyone’s season started off with a bang, and that your kids are logging those miles!

Nate & Brad

New Server (The Cherry II)

natatkinson    Development    

You know you’re nerdy when you have a name for your server – but would you expect any less?

In anticipation for SteepleWeb going “public” – we are going to retire our current server (The Cherry), and put the new fantastic Cherry II online.  To clarify going “public” – We will be ending our “beta” period this summer.  This means that we are no longer limiting our customer base – and we will start having some paid-plans.

But this post isn’t about business – its about servers.

We just bought all the parts, and will be assembling it within the week  Here is the load-out:

1 – Quad-Core Processor
4 – 2TB HDD’s in RAID 5
6 – 4GB Ram – 24GB total

It should be able to handle quite a bit of growth for SteepleWeb (and the few other sites we host on it)!

Version 2.0.1 Pushed Out

natatkinson    Development     release

Just wanted to keep you in the loop and let you know about the update that came out today.  This update includes:

• Ability to comment on training logs
• Ability to comment on custom pages
• Points & Gender field for meets
• Ability to add points with a result
• Ability to create a roster for each season (instead of just 1 per year)

Not to mention numerous bug fixes that you’ve been reporting since our 2.0.0 release.  Also some optimizations to improve speed.  If you notice any issues with these new features, please let us know.

Past 2.0.0 and Not looking Back!
We appreciate everyone’s patience with the migration to 2.0.0 – it was a big change, but a big change that is really going to let SteepleWeb grow and be so much more useful to you – our users!

We now have a system in place for automatic error reports – so anytime an error does occur on your site – we receive full error report that gives us all the information required to solve the issue. This means that SteepleWeb will become a much more stable & reliable product as we continue to add features.

Some New Designs
We’ve had a designer get us some more templates – so that means that hopefully soon, you will have some more options as to how your site looks – and trust, they will look good!  Hopefully more on this soon!

Keep Getting out the door each day, the cold is good for you

Nate & Brad

Version 2 is out

natatkinson    Development     release

After weeks of getting the new database built and tested, and then week smore of writing a migration script (well over 2000 lines of code) – we migrated every site (except for runportland) to our 2.0.0 version of SteepleWeb.

So you may be wondering “where are all the new great features?”  Well, they aren’t here yet, but they are going to be here soon.  After a solid year of testing SteepleWeb with a handful of beta testing teams, we need to make some significant changes to really bring the features and usability that our teams were looking for.  It was a massive database change – so while not evening getting new features – they are actually a few bugs we have to work out.

Have no fear though, because once we get these bugs fixed, we are going to start brining you the updates that you’ve requested.  We’ve already implemented Facebook adn twitter integration for the users (still at beta stage, but users can sync their Facebook and twitter account, post to these outlets after logging up a run, for example).  Also, a user can now be part of multiple teams – we had a few users that had their high school and collegiate teams on SteepleWeb – now they can be a part of both sites.

We are working with a designer to bring more templates – which means your team sites are going to start looking a lot better cause i’m not designing anymore!  We are planning on giving each team the option to change their template whenever they want – and allowing each team to edit their local css file to give the greatest control over what your site looks like.  But don’t worry, Brad and I are still here to help you get your site looking how you want.

What we are Looking to Become

The new vision for SteepleWeb is to become the home of everything for running.  There are plenty of great running websites out there (flotrack, dyestat, etc..) – so why are we trying to be the center of the running world?  Because no other service out there offers what SteepleWeb offers – a home website for your team.  All the features in SteepleWeb are unrivaled – no other service will give you everything SW will give you.

Results, videos, pictures, and training log – its all going to be available at steeple-web.com – it will be the culmination and center of all the SW sites.

Soon, we will have built-in meet registration system, and meet results upload.  This means that if you are hosting a meet, you can take all the registrations online, and then dump that file for use in Hy-tek.  After the meet is done, you can export the results from Hy-tek into the SW database.  The benefits for your team and the sport will be groundbreaking!

Thank You

Thanks to all our beta testing teams – over a year of feedback from you has helped SteepleWeb grow tremendously.  We are planning to roll out an referral program – so you will get rewarded for brining more teams to SteepleWeb.

We will keep you updated as we continue to grow.  Thanks for using SteepleWeb!

Progress on Version 2.0.0

natatkinson    Development    

Hey folks, you may have not heard from us for a while, but its heavy coding season here at SteepleWeb – taking all your requests and actually making them available.

There is a large technical change with version 2, so there is some expected downtime in the near future (Hopefully October), when there will be some database changes that will pave the way for the future changes.

When version 2.0.0 rolls-out, you probably won’t see all the features we’ve told you about – but dont’ worry, they will come.  2.0.0 will lay the groundwork for all our future changes, and get SteepleWeb ready to go out of beta in the summer of 2011.

Appreciate all the feedback from our testing teams – and I’m excited to be doing some real coding and making all these cool changes.  But my fiance gets a little annoyed when I have trouble sleeping because I’m running through code in my head while I sleep.

Peace
-Nate