Friday, July 11th, 2008
We're Sorry… We installed some important security updates on our server today, and when we tried to restart, it didn't come back up. Usually the restart process is complete in under a minute, and we avoid doing this when there is visible activity on the site. We need to be better about doing this late at night, but in this case we opted for a daytime restart because this was a pressing security concern.

On the plus side (and not related to this problem), we have updated the video player. You might have to refresh a video page in your browser to load the new player, but it applies to all videos, new or old.

The new player has major coding changes that are all for the better. One of the main things you will notice is that videos do not start loading when you go to a video page. We realized that each person will visit a video page multiple times, mainly to read new comments. Loading the video in with each page load is a waste of bandwidth and can cause unnecessary slow-down in your browser.

If you have become accustomed to letting the blue bar fill up before you play a movie, you can still do that. Just press the large play button, then quickly press it again. This triggers the downloading process and will pause the movie until you press play again.

We have also updated the code behind the mute button. This was a potential cause of some of the "I have no audio, bro!" complaints that we heard about but were never able to replicate. Also now you can mute the movie before it even starts playing.

Again, we're very sorry about the downtime. We're learning as we go, and are only up to page 12 of the "HTML for Dummies" picture book.