Phase One of the Ningin redesign. Please enjoy the new Community Page!

Ningin doesn’t have a home page per se like most websites. Rather an equivalent that we call the Community Page which takes a snapshot of all the different things happening within Ningin at a given time. It was natural for us to start with this section first. The goal of this redesign was to introduce a cleaner layout and more intuitive navigation. I hope you can agree that we made a big step towards accomplishing that goal.

You might have to refresh your browser by pressing F5 for everything to work properly.

As mentioned before, a new design was only part of the new Ningin. There are many more features and functionally in the pipeline. This phase of the upgrades not only changes the Community Page, but adds the foundations for those new features which will be added in later as they are developed and tested. Every one of our current applications, Forums, Blogs, Social News, and Profiles, will receive major upgrades in features and functionality. When this upgrade is all said and done, we will be at Ningin 2.0 =)
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Tags: Design, firefox, ie6, ningin, upgrade

Short version: Around 1am Tuesday morning we took our servers down to allow us to work on preparations for the new design and new features. During this time a hard drive problem was discovered on our lone database server. While we have multiple web servers, we only had one database server. Because it was the hard drive that needed replacing, we basically had to install and reconfigure everything all over again. However, no data was loss during this entire process as we made a complete backup before taking the server offline. All in all, Ningin was down for about 36 hours - 4 hours spent diagnosing the problem, 18 hours waiting on a new server, 8 hours setup time, 4 hours originally scheduled upgrade and maintenance, and last but not least, 2 hours of intermittent sleep. Sorry to keep you waiting, but that’s how it was.
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Tags: downtime, funny story, maintenance, server, upgrade

As some of you already know (many of you actually don’t), we’re in the processing of a complete make-over for Ningin. Perhaps it’s more fitting to say Ningin will experience a major upgrade in both design and features. Every single area of Ningin will look different. Every single application (social news, blog, forums, profiles) will have new features. Plus, we’re adding one new application! The tentative date for all of this is in about 2-3 weeks. Some site downtime will happen (it’s also an infrastructure upgrade). Most likely this will happen in phases, so the whole upgrade might last as long as a month.

While this upgrade will have many different focuses, the main one is something I’ve stressed about a lot on Ningin, Community. There will be a lot more things you can do to interact with the users on Ningin. There will be a lot more interactions with other Asian media websites. Probably most importantly, there will a lot more interactions in the offline world as well with event happenings and charity organizations. The latter isn’t going to happen right away, but it is a major goal of ours.

Looking back, it’s hard to believe that Ningin has only been on this path since March of this year. The amount of growth in users and content has definitely been great! Who knows where we’ll be if we continue at this pace.

Tags: Design, downtime, features, new, ningin, upgrade