Dropkick Studios

Last week we pushed out the first stages of a complete solution for people who have multiple assignr.com accounts. If you have multiple assignr.com accounts, we’d love to have you give it a spin and let us know how it works.

To link two or more assignr.com accounts together, follow the instructions here:

http://assignr.com/help/account/multiple_accounts

Once you’ve linked the accounts together, you’ll be able to:

• switch between accounts easily
• enter availability once and have it updated in both accounts
• an assignment on one account will block your availability for the other account.

If you are a parent of a referee, and you are managing multiple accounts for your kids, this probably won’t be what you’re looking for yet, since it assumes that availability is the same across linked accounts.

If you are an assignor, and one of your referees is assigned to a game on another site, you will see an “X” conflict indicator on the assign screen. This will tell you that they have an eXternal conflict, and can’t work one of your games.

We don’t yet have a way to see all of the games for both accounts on one screen, but that’s the plan once we have a few people try it out.

Give it a try and let us know if you have problems.

We opened up our doors in October of 2009, and have gone through a couple of hardware transitions. This past May, we moved to Blue Box Group, a web hosting provider that specializes in Ruby on Rails web hosting.

Over the last month, we’ve been working on a significant infrastructure upgrade for assignr.com. We’ve been able to manage the traffic and load from our service on a single server for the past two years. Without going into too much technical detail, we’ve been able to manage everything with two servers: a test server, and our “live” single server, something like you see to the right.

Our server was more than capable of handling the amount of traffic on our site. However, the big problem with running our site on a single server is that, if something goes wrong, our service will be impacted.

This past week, we moved assignr.com to our new server cluster. Our goal with this project is to provide a level of redundancy that we just couldn’t have with a single server.

No web provider can guarantee 100% uptime. However, with our new hardware stack, we are much more able to ride through traffic spikes, server outages, and hardware failures while maintaining a high level of availability.

We realize that most of you might not get excited about this, but we think that it’s important to share our efforts with you.

Thanks for your continued support of assignr.com, we appreciate it!

With the weather starting to turn colder, it’s harder and harder to stay motivated to keep in shape. Shane Livensparger at OfficiallyFit.net has put together an awesome program to keep you going.

There’s no catch… it’s free to join, you can get a free t-shirt, and the best testimonial will win a $250 cash prize. Just sign up, and the crew at Officially Fit will e-mail you a daily workout routine that will keep you on track with your fitness goals.

We think this is such a great program that we’ve decided to sponsor Officially Fit’s first “No Excuses” challenge.

Registration for the first challenge closes on Saturday, October 29, so what are you waiting for?

Click here to register.