BrinkZINE: Bus Plunge and Beta Testing!

Bus Plunge and Beta Testing!

I want to thank all of you for bearing with us during this very stinky period of Brink Beta Testing. I know the word intermittent takes on new meaning when something that worked yesterday, stops working today, and all variations in between. Yes, if we were a large company with a decent budget we'd have a "private launch" with dedicated testers giving us daily feedback. Well, that's sort of what we have, only we are live to the public (you) and we have no real budget to deal with these kinds of things.

You have to picture this: a roomful of earnest programmers, fixing bugs and finishing new features, all the while taking care of client work and trying to hold it all together.

The Dashboard is a flash file. Flash files cache very easily and this one impressively so. Browsers cache files so they can save time loading it the next time that file is used. Any work we do to it makes our version different from your cached one.

Really, without tons of time going by between new dashboards being uploaded to the server, everyone should clear their cache and dump their cookies - between each new upload of the dashboard. That would be at least once a day, maybe more. And if you log in and out to different accounts you should clear your caches then also. So what can I say? We've been working on the dashboard daily (not on weekends). So, if you experience any problems, clear your CACHE and your COOKIES!.... For directions on how to do that go to the FAQ link at the bottom of every page.

So yes,

there are problems. But the concepts of our little brink network I think are starting to become more evident. We have better social networking features, and we also celebrate the content, your content, more so than any other site around. We are interested in what you have to share with us, and what you are saying, thinking, seeing, hearing, not how many friends you can share with us.

To strengthen that appreciation for content, we now have Brink Editors for each category -- so far we have around 10 signed up -- we have room for 16 more. If you want to be the Editor of a category -- let me know. How to let me know? Use our Brink Mail feature - go to my page and "send me a message". The Brink Editors can write editorials that don't need jury approval. They can feature content. Soon, we'll have more things for them to do, a multitide of ways they can promote their categories.

Even more features coming down the pike: Currently you can save the Embed Code of a slideshow of video and use that code to publish elsewhere (like MySpace)... Soon we will have much better export features that will let you publish just about anything, not only to Brink.com, but other pages as well. We now have an RSS feed (accessible in the footer of every page) and soon, for you techies out there, we will have an API (accessible from you MyBrink page) that will let you publish ALL of your content as an xml stream to any other site you chose (like your own blog for instance). And for all you people that can stand the black, sometime next week we'll have a way to toggle to white (only for people logged in). This will be an account feature accessible from your MyBrink Account Settings panel at the top in the pink bar.

So keep telling us about the bugs, and CLEAR YOUR CACHE if you are having them. Not only your CACHE but your COOKIES too!. And if that doesn't work try loading a NEW FLASH PLUGIN. This site uses FLASH PLAYER 9. We are a modern site for modern peoples.

If maybe you do feel that we are draggin' you, kickin' and screamin', into our version of a Brave New World full of baloney and gunk. Somewhat like bus plunge. Your neighbor is now a pile of blood and guts. That's a perfectly valid feeling. Please, just don't hurt the animals. That's all we ask.