Priorities: iPhone App and Current Work

I mentioned earlier that by now we would have an iPhone App. That has not happened and I feel I owe you an explanation.

Two new factors came into play:

1. The current DVDAF setup can no longer handle the number of users it has.
2. Our revenue (donations and commissions from Amazon) went down and our costs are going up.

Both of these are "life-support" type issues and need to be addressed quickly. That is the reason why the iPhone App kind of took a backseat.


Here is what we are working on:

Increasing Capacity for DVDAF

• More, bigger, better machines. We are moving from 3 older servers to 5 newer ones. The new machines are bigger and more powerful.
  
  Until now the DVDAF database was in a single machine. In this new setup the data is distributed over 3 machines. The challenge we will be facing over the next few weeks is that in each machine the information gets written at different time. Therefore we will need to add smarts into the website so that it knows where to get what when.
  
  It is also possible that what was fast in 1 machine becomes slow when you use 3 machines. It is not intuitive and the explanations are complicated, but it happens. What matters is that it is possible that things get a bit rocky until we iron out all the kinks.

Obviously 5 bigger machines cost more than 3 smaller machines and that leads us to the second issue.

Addressing Revenue Shortfall

The approach has 3 fronts:

• Increase the number of members. With more members we hope that donations and more Amazon sales will rise accordingly. To that end we want to make DVDAF more accessible, changing landing pages, providing simplified ways to sign up and enter a collection, a sexier skin, etc. We want someone who has never seen on the site to be able to sign up and have 100 titles up in less than 5 minutes.
  
  
• Add Advertisement. We resisted adding ads to the site for almost 10 years, but we can use the extra boost now. We will experiment a bit. Currently we are thinking 1 vertical ad on the right side of the page.
  
  
• Get film-talk.com to stand on its own. We do not have formal data on this, but it is my opinion that in the past film-talk has relied either on DVDAF or on me to pay its bills. To this end we have added advertising and are now tracking film-talk commissions from DVDs and other Amazon sales separately from DVDAF. We also have been using a few tools related to traffic and advertising to learn a few things which will help us with DVDAF.

As you can see we have a large amount of urgent work. That is why the iPhone app is a bit late.

Thank you for your understanding and support,

-Ed

In a Couple of Days DVDAF Will Disappear

And pop back up a few hours later :)

How long that will take depends on where on the Internet you are, but it is usually about 5-7 hours -- for some people it can take over a day. It is happening as we move to the new machines and the new addresses get propagated all over the net.

When it comes back up DVDAF will be able to respond to more people more quickly because its new machine is faster and has more memory.

In the weeks that follow we will spread DVDAF over a larger set of machines so that 200 people can be helped by machine #1, 200 by machine #2 and another 300 by machine #3 and so on.

With all this work and horsepower DVDAF should be good for another couple of years :)

We kindly remind you that DVDAF needs your help!

If your situation permits please Make a Donation



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Your help is the only thing making DVDAF possible

We thank you for your support!

-The DVDAF Team

New dvdaf servers, An end to outages (we hope)

We just signed the contract for the new dvdaf servers.

This should end the outages dvdaf is having... collections not being displayed, etc. We are having these problems because more people are hitting dvdaf than the current servers can handle.

DVDAF itself will take 4 machines. 3 of them are quad-cores with plenty of memory, a 4th machine is the picture server and is a bit smaller.

Film-talk will also migrate to a new server, our 5th machine. We worked out the deal so that this new machine will be better and cheaper than the one film-talk.com currently runs on.

We will roll off the current machines over the next 10 days. You may expect film-talk.com and dvdaf.com to be down a few times for a few hours as we migrate.

Thanks!

More Search Features

Over the past week we have rolled out about 20 bug-fixes and small improvements.

The new stuff includes:

Ability to search within your own collection

The "exclude mine" option now flips to "include mine" when you click on it (make sure the flipping option is on in your Search Preferences).

Pinning is back

You may pin Region, Media and the Include/Exclude titles from your collection options. These are sticky settings and remain in effect for all your searches until you unpin them. They follow you across computers and browsers as long as you are logged in.

Media added to search preferences

Just like "Region" you can set your preferences for "Media Type" (DVD, Blu-ray, etc.). These are more flexible than pinning because you can easily override them temporarily. They will come back when you are finished with your search sequence, or press the clear button.

Sticky criteria while looking at someone else's collection

This is a great feature because it allows you to look at someone else's collection and easily apply your pinned criteria over it. For example you can pin "exc mine" and then go to http://dvdaf-criterion.dvdaf.com/owned/criterion to see what are the Criterion titles you are missing.

Easy identification of current versus OOP titles

This icon denotes items for which we do not have prices. It makes it easy to figure out which are real titles that you can get versus the ones that are OOP, bonus disks or only part of a box set.

So... where do I find this stuff?

Check the "Options" link next to "Go" and "Clear" in the search bar where you can access your search preference settings.

...next

Working ont the new homepage and iPhone app as described in

The Road Ahead. All else kinda on hold.

Thanks!

Blocked IP addresses

We have been blocking what we perceive to be ill behaved web crawlers. These are automated robots collecting information for search engines and such. Some of them put an undue load on the servers for the benefit they provide. This degrades the experience for real people.

If you find yourself permanently unable to access dvdaf your IP address may have been inadvertently blocked because you were "too close" to a robot.

Contact us at FT or Twitter and we will help you with your situation.

Thanks!

The Road Ahead

We would share some of our thoughts on dvdaf’s immediate future.

A more compelling destination

We would like for the home page http://www.dvdaf.com to be a more compelling destination. We are thinking upcoming titles, recent releases, leader boards (of some sort), select deals, etc. I’m hoping to get a first cut over the next week or two.

iPhone!

An iPhone app of sorts is on the horizon. I expect an initial version to be out by the end of March.

FilmAf

The 800lbs gorilla. The concept needs to get a bit more mature. It is a huge amount of work for everyone at dvdaf and we will need everyone’s help updating the database. However, this is needed to support the next wave of functionality including naming members of the cast, having multiple genres, a better ratting and recommendation system, etc.

Comments, thoughts, concerns?

Thanks!

DVDAF's New iSearch

A new, fresher, faster, easier to use, interactive search for dvdaf.

Interactive

Start typing a word, wait half a second and the auto-complete will kick in offering you a series of suggestions taking into account your media and region settings. Place your mouse over a suggestion for a picture preview of the matches. Make your choice by clicking either on the image or the auto-completed suggestion.

Simpler

Pick your preferred region using the "Options" button. This and the media type are the only choices most people will ever need. Especially if you consider that DVDAF's iSearch is smart enough to recognize directors, studios, UPCs, Amazon ASINs, and imdb ids.

Flexible

The older, more arcane, choices can still be accessed with the "Options" button assisting you to put together complex search criteria.

Pinning

It is tucked away under "Options". We need to re-write that piece, which will take place in due time. However, with the new preferred region setting most people will no longer need to use this complicated feature.

As usual see the change log for additional features and bug fixes.

Thanks!