We’ve basically changed everything about YAMU and right now it’s full of bugs. We apologize for the inconvenience and hope you’ll bear with us as we get everything sorted out over the next few days.
We promise that A) it’ll stabilize and B) lead to a much better experience in weeks to come.
Here’s what’s going on
1. New Server (new waiter)
We’ve switched from Rackspace to Linode. Linode is cheaper and faster, but the downside is that changing servers introduces a range of problems. The main problem has been that yamu.lk and www.yamu.lk have been resolving differently. This seems minor, but it caused a host of random problems where bits of code didn’t connect and made the site inaccessible.
Bugs: A lot of people saw a messed up homepage (like above) and were basically stuck on it.
Fix: That has been fixed, you just need to hard refresh the page.
Benefits: Why are we switching at all? Well, this server is about 5x cheaper while also being more powerful. The downside is that it takes a bit more skill to admin it, but we’ve managed to fix most of the hiccups pretty fast. Long term we can handle a lot more traffic on a server like this without breaking the bank. We hope you understand.
2. New Backend (kitchen is on fire)
Since the beginning, YAMU has been edited on WordPress. WordPress is a good blogging platform, but it was a bit over-complicated for our needs and we’d hacked it so much that it was ungainly and slow (on the backend). We’ve now switched over to a new custom backend which, while currently full of bugs, is something that we can modify and keep tightening to make our publishing and advertising process more and more efficient.
Bugs: Right now our writers are facing bugs when it comes to creating reviews, saving, uploading images, the works. These should all be fixed by today.
Fix: lots of stress for Janith
Benefits: We have more control over how we produce content now. Initially this means more control to break things, but long term we can produce content easier and faster and eventually open up more and more of our database to users, restaurant owners, etc.
3. New Frontend (furniture still arriving)
Everything you see, in terms of design and user experience, is also new. There are some features like cuisine types (you can now search for Chinese or burgers. Beyond that there are some look and feel changes. We tried the Medium style parallax effect, but with ads it looks crappy and breaks stuff. Beyond that everything is negotiable and we’re going to add a lot of stuff in the coming (frenzied) week.
4. Why Now?
Honestly, we just kinda pushed this out. We’ve been working on this update for almost four months now and we knew the final stuff wouldn’t get fixed until it was out in the field. However, we didn’t anticipate this many bugs, but who does? Changing everything at once is kinda aggressive (we could have just changed the backend, or changed stuff one at a time) but after one week of annoyance for you and extreme stress for us (mainly Janith), we think there’ll be a better website for all.
So, please bear with us, email dev@yamu.lk with issues, and please keep visiting the site. At the least you can see new things breaking and being fixed every hour or so.
