Back on it full time!

Many thanks for your efforts so far - and to those of you who have recently expressed an interest in trialling the new site, a very warm welcome.

Our numbers are steadily rising and what you've been able to tell us has been extremely useful in honing the community to suit its users.

We're still fixing some of the bugs you've helped uncover. I'm now back from a brief break helping out another part of the business, and our developers are back full time on the LRO project.

Just as well really - we're committed to a mid-November public launch!

Please do come and have another try on the test site. Blogs in particular are worth persisting with as we're going to retain much of the content you've created in the blogs on the new site (obviously we'll get rid of the tests and errors) but we're now in a position where you can start building a strong blog to give yourself a great head-start when launch happens. Make sure you rate each others work, too!

Hope to see you soon over at: http://lro.stage3.rmg.russellsharpe.com/blogs/index.ehtml

Best regards
dc

Bugs and fixes - and a brief break from me!

New site development is continuing well.
We're pretty much into bug fixing and things like data imports, creating the news archive and admin functions now.
There's no doubt, blogs and forums took longer than Toby estimated. So the reality is the launch is going to be rather later than I had led you all to believe - for which I apologise.
We're now looking at middle of next month for everything live and online.
My understanding is that this is a cast iron certainty - further drift ain't likely to get tolerated by any party!
What this also means is there is a short lull in the requirement for my full-time focus on the new site development. For this reason I feel I am able to answer a call from MCN (I am officially still on secondment from motorcyclenews.com) to bail them out of a pretty deep and unavaoidable hole. From Monday I'll be heading up the production team on MCN.
I've agreed to help out for just two weeks, to give them breathing space to re-organise.
I will be staying in minute-by-minute contact with the LRO new site development via all the usual routes. I may not be able to update the current site as often as I'd wish (but it won't be entirely neglected, I promise).
In the meantime, please keep testing the new site, I will see, and make the most of, all feedback you have to offer. And I'll still be looking in here, too.
The worrying thing is how little you might notice I'm gone!

Blogs now available for test

Hi all,

The new LRO blogs are now available for test.
We've got a few more bits to sort out - finishing off the blogs homepage, adding the video element, adding the email-a-friend easy-share stuff.

But the basic of creating, adding a post, editing them, adding images, adding galleries, adding links etc are all in pretty good shape. So is the ratings system.

I think it's all pretty user friendly. But I'm just one person. So let's hear back from those of you who have signed up to give it a try!

FYI a groups function will be added soon after launch - the backend for this is already in place.