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.

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!

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.

• 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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Link: The Sun

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?