Working Hard Over Here at Expanding Our Coverage

For a long time, there were very few new rating lists added to the main RateItAll section. The vast majority of the new stuff came in from members in the form of Weblists. This dynamic was mostly the function of RateItAll not having any resources, and partly the function of not having efficient tools to add new listings.

Well, now I have some help over here and some new tools, and some folks have been working very hard at expanding our product coverage. I wrote already about all the new baby product review sections that we've added. More recently we've been focusing on pet product reviews (pet beds, pet carriers, dog health products, etc), health and beauty reviews (hair styling tools, bath scales, fitness shakes), and sporting good reviews (archery products, badminton racquets, baseball bats, etc.). We've also added sections for radar detector reviews, luggage reviews, and Christian books.

Weblists continue to be a crucial part of the site - I think they are largely responsible for giving RIA it's unique "rate anything" flavor and personality. But I also think it's time for the RIA team to start pulling OUR weight in making sure we have coverage for popular product rating categories.

If anyone has ideas / requests for product rating categories that they would like to see covered, please let me know and I'll see what I can do.

We've Gone Baby Crazy

A certain member of the RateItAll team - he/she shall go unnamed - has a baby, and has been complaining about the lack of baby rating categories on RateItAll. Waah.

So we've gone a bit baby crazy, adding sections for Crib Reviews, Cradle Swing Reviews, and Baby Gate reviews to the site. We've also considerably beefed up our stroller reviews section.

So if you have a baby, know a baby, or ever were a baby, I'd encourage you to please click through and write some baby product reviews.

A New Logo!

Guys, check it out....

RateItAll is the proud owner of a sleek new logo.

It reminds me of fireworks! Or a sleek rocket ship! Or shooting golden stars through the night sky!

OK, maybe I'm getting carried away... but I REALLY like the logo.

Our old logo was originally designed to be very "business-y" - this one seems a lot friendlier to me.

If you have kind words to say, please send them to Lena.

If you have harsh words to say, please send them to Jose.

And if you want to rate the logo, click HERE.

And we're back....

... two hours ahead of schedule. Thanks to Automatt for his hard work in getting us cut over and all the prep work he did to make this a smooth transition.

If you see anything not working properly, please let me know.

Cutting Over to a New Host - DOWNTIME IMMINENT

Guys, as we continue to deal with site and rating engagement growth, we will be cutting over to a new host today.

Currently our architecture looks like this: one pretty good database server, one very fast web server, one OK web server, one weak web server.

As of later tonight, our architecture will look like this: One very good database server, five very fast web servers.

We expect a noticeable improvement in performance, and of course, the ability to handle several times the amount of traffic that we can today.

We're going to be down for about six hours while we transfer our massive database to the new host.