Dropkick Studios

Over the last month, we’ve made some big changes and a few smaller changes as well. Here’s a quick summary:

• You can now upload a profile picture. This picture will be visible to other referees, and your assignor will be able to see your smiling face when they assign you to a game.

• For assignors, we have completely redone the assign screen. This is your “one stop shop” for assigning referees, and it makes it very easy to see a lot of information about each official, right in one place.

• We’ve added a new report that will let you run a game count, so that you can see how many games each referee is assigned to over a date range.

• We’ve also fixed a navigation problem with people who are not referees. If you are on the ability, availability, or conflicts screen, clicking the “next person” or “previous person” links would send you to the welcome screen if the person was not a referee. This has been fixed.

On the hardware side of things,  we will soon be transitioning to a new hardware configuration that will help keep our service online, even if a server goes down. Right now we have a staging server that we use for testing and development, and a production server that runs the assignr.com website. Our current single server configuration is more than capable of handling the traffic for our site, but we want to ensure that our service remains available, even if a server goes offline.

As we transition to our new hardware configuration, there will be some short periods of down-time, but we promise to keep these to a minimum and to keep you informed. Our new configuration will be a huge improvement, and is a big step towards ensuring that assignr.com remains available when you need it.

You may be aware that we had several outages this past week. If these outages impacted you, please accept my sincere apology for the problems that we caused you and your officials.

On Thursday afternoon our primary server experienced a hardware failure at around 5:30pm Eastern time. It took approximately two hours to get back up and running. Our web hosting service informed us that we would be moved to new hardware later that evening, and we would be offline briefly during this transition.

Unfortunately this transition didn’t actually take place until Saturday morning at around 1:30am. When our service was moved to new hardware, our site didn’t restart correctly, and our web host did not realize that there was a problem. We didn’t realize there was a problem until that morning, and service wasn’t completely restored until just before 11am.

In light of the problems that we experienced, we scheduled a reboot of our server at around 10pm on Sunday night, to ensure that everything was back in place after the move. This should have only taken a few minutes, but unfortunately our server went offline again, and we worked with our web host to restore service at around 11:15pm.

We know that you depend on our service for your referee scheduling, and we are very sorry if these outages caused you problems this past week. Our overnight outage on Saturday may have impacted our American customers, but we are certain that it impacted our customers in Australia, the UK, and Sri Lanka.

As a result of the problems we had last week, We’ve taken the following steps to minimize this from happening again:

• We’ve always had a number of server monitoring tools that help us identify problems if they occur. This past weekend, our web host put some additional server monitoring in place as well. We are hoping that this will allow our host’s system administrators to take action even if it’s in the middle of the night on the East coast.

• We have just put up a new “service status” website, hosted on a completely different server. We are hoping this will allow us to better communicate in the event of a service outage. You can visit this site at http://status.assignr.com. We believe that transparency is very important, especially when it comes to the availability of our service.

• With our existing server setup, we’ve put in a lot of effort to ensure that we can recover from a server failure. However, we need to look at ways to provide additional redundancy to our service.

If you have any questions, please get in touch with us.

We just rolled out our support for maps in assignr.com. You can now put your venues on a Google map.

Once an assignor sets the location for a venue, you’ll be able to see the venue on a map, and get driving directions to the venue.

We are also providing a public venue directory, so you can see all of the venues for your organization in one place.

You can read more about this feature in our online help system. If you have feedback, please send it our way!

I am thrilled to announce that the assignr.com mobile site is up and running!

If you navigate to assignr.com with your mobile browser, it should automatically redirect to the mobile version. You can also get there by typing m.assignr.com in your browser.

The mobile version of assignr.com should give you the capability to view your games, accept/decline, and view your referee directory. Assignors can also assign referees, add/edit games, and edit/view the assignments for anyone on their site. Initially, we are keeping the feature set small, so that we can see how people are using the site and get some feedback.

We’ve designed the site to work well across a variety of mobile phone web browsers. If you’re a web nerd, like me, we’re using an early version of jQuery Mobile to put the site together.

Please let us know what you think. You can find us on Twitter at @assignr, “Like” us on Facebook, drop us a line in our public forum, or open a help desk ticket.  If you run into problems, make sure to let us know what brand/model of phone you are using.

This past week, we made a change to the privacy settings on assignr.com.

We have always provided ways for referees to control their contact information. Referees can choose which contact methods are visible to the other referees in their site. Referees can send messages to each other through our site, without disclosing their e-mail address to the other referees on their site.

A referee can now restrict their profile from other referees. Since assignr.com is primarily a communication tool for referees, many referees will not want to make this change. However, since we have a lot of parents who manage the officiating schedules for their kids, we want to ensure that they have the appropriate tools to manage the visibility of their contact information.

A referee with a restricted profile will not be visible in the People tab, and will not be visible from the message screen. If a referee is assigned to a game with a referee who has a restricted profile, they will see that the referee has been assigned. Referees who have a restricted profile will still be able to receive messages from their officiating partners, if they are assigned to a game together.

Assignors will still have full access to a referee’s contact information. Observers will still have access as well, depending on the privacy settings that have been set up for the site.

By default, referee profiles are visible but their address, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses are concealed. If you want to set up a restricted profile:

• Login to assignr.com
• Click your name in the upper right corner of the screen
• Click the Edit link
• Check the Hide Profile from Other Referees checkbox
• Click Update

If you have any questions about our new settings, please get in touch with us.

When it comes to officiating, it’s been a huge focus for us to stay on top of emerging technology. Here’s something that we think you’ll be seeing at a venue near you very soon.

Link: The Sun

This past fall, Todd Skaggs from the Referee Nation podcast interviewed me about referee assigning and our assigning service, assignr.com. The experience has me reflecting back on my officiating career, so I think I am going to post some of my thoughts on life as a referee.

Listen to the interview.

I have to admit, it was a little nerve wracking being interviewed.

Wow, you were pretty young to be refereeing Division 1 soccer.

I’ve been working closely with referee assignors since 1998, and continue to do so, but I haven’t worn the uniform on the field since 2001.

I think I mumbled something about “relative skill level”, since I was an assistant referee on some NCAA Division 1 womens games (Washington State University and Gonzaga U), but I don’t think I’d really given it that much thought. I suppose it’s not quite “normal” to finish refereeing a NCAA Division 1 game, hit the locker room, change into my “street clothes”, and walk back to my on-campus apartment so I can get some studying done.

Truth be told, it had everything to do with working hard and the mentors I had along the way.

In high school, I became a member of the North Chapter referee association, based in Snohomish County. I got to rub elbows with some of the best referees in the state, and a few of them who went on to receive national recognition.  Tim Busch, Linda Velie, Sue Cole, Sandra Hunt, Wally Beaumont, and many others.

I can’t say enough about the amount that I learned from Linda Velie.  She was an amazing referee in her day, and I always learned something new when I worked with her.  Linda was the first woman to work a mens professional game in 1990 and went on to become a mentor for many US FIFA referees.  I had the opportunity to work games with her as an assistant referee on a number of occasions.  On her induction into the Region IV Hall of Fame, someone mentioned her using the “Velie Sandwich” as her way of giving you feedback. I think I remember getting this on more than one occasion. She would start out with a genuine compliment on something you did really well, then ask a question that cut to the heart of the constructive feedback she was giving you, then she’d follow it up by making sure that you know that she really liked you. I was thrilled to learn that she was honored by the Seattle Sounders.

Walt Boyd was our assignor in Skagit County.  At the time, there was maybe two or three “premier” clubs in Skagit Valley, so if you wanted to get the good games, you drove to Snohomish County. Usually once or twice a week I was getting a ride with Walt somewhere to go work a game. Walt had me working anything from an Under-14 lines, all the way up to Premier League U-19s, Olympic Development Program matches, varsity high school,  As much as Walt may not have been loved much by the fans, he was one of a number of people who helped me with my officiating.

Wally Beaumont was an referee instructor at the time that I was a referee… I didn’t realize at the time what a “legend” he was in the soccer world until I moved to New York and was asked if I knew who he was. I also had the amazing opportunity to learn from Raul Dominguez… Raul was a FIFA referee at the time, and he held a clinic in the Seattle area and it was an amazing experience to learn from him.

So these are some of my mentors throughout my officiating career, who are your mentors?

As you might have noticed, this morning we took assignr.com offline for a system upgrade. Our task this morning was to move assignr.com to our new web hosting provider, Blue Box Group.  This was the first time in 18 months that we’ve taken the service offline for a maintenance window longer than 15 minutes. We had planned for an hour this morning, and we were able to bring the service back online within 45 minutes of taking the service offline.

If our outage caused you problems today, please accept our apology. It was a challenge for us to find a good window to take the site offline, especially since we have customers with games occurring at all hours of the day across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. We don’t do this very often, so we hope that you’ll understand as we work to make our service better.

Overall I was very happy with how smoothly the transition went. We had a short period of time where mail to @assignr.com e-mail addresses was not working correctly, but otherwise everything seemed to go well.

We were starting to outgrow our previous server environment, but we also needed to make a change in our web hosting provider. We are huge believers in maintaining transparency, especially when it comes to our service. We had three short outages in December and January, which unfortunately just wasn’t meeting our standards for service.

We’re very excited to be hosting assignr.com with Blue Box. They are one of the leading web hosting providers for Ruby on Rails, the web framework we used to build assignr.com.  Although we haven’t been working with them very long, we’ve found them to be super responsive and really helpful as we transitioned to a larger server environment.

Today we pushed out a major update to assignr.com. assignr.com is built using the Ruby on Rails web development framework, and we just upgraded assignr.com from Rails 2.x to Rails 3. You might notice some minor cosmetic changes with the site. There aren’t any new features in this release, however, a significant amount of our code base has changed.

We’ve done a lot of work to make sure everything still works as before.  If you notice any problems with the site, please get in touch with us.