Shannon's Journal Discussion Thread, Vol. 5

[Shannon]

I greatly appreciate the offers of help, guys.  It's good to know the community cares.  I'm not sure that the issue is really something that would be worth bothering you guys with.  Basically we did the product transfer months ago when we were expecting to open the store back in April.  And all sorts of problems, delays and issues later, and have released four or five programs since then.  Now we have to add those programs to the product database.

The issue isn't so much with adding them; that's relatively straight forward.  The issue is with understanding how the service we use for hosing the download links is doing things and getting the subscriptions to work properly.  So the real issue is understanding how we need to do things to add new products.  That's being worked on as we speak by Steve and Michael.

New stuff is confusing, but man, the way some of this on the back end is set up between these two services (hosting download links when we use off-site existing storage elsewhere and the subscription services) is VERY confusing.  Obviously designed by engineers, lol.  We are working on creating a step by step how to guide for me and Ben to use for the future.  Everything else has been figured out.  So that's the "out of sync" issue, but it's not really a database issue at this point.

I'm confident we will have this figured out shortly, and then everything will be fine.  But I will keep you guys in mind should there come a day when we need help in the future.  I like the idea of community members working with us.

Hi Shannon,

Well, except for the part of throwing engineers under the bus, I get it. Though I have known a lot of engineers that designed things and set them up the way THEY think not the way a user thinks . Modern design practices and tools have helped overcome many of these shortcomings, though. 

Any sort of migration like the one you are doing can be a pain as you learn the new procedures. Hopefully, the new ones you're dealing with won't be overly complex and you can get it down quickly.

Well, if I can pitch in, let me know. Sounds like there are others as well, so good for you! 

Cheers!
Ron

I can throw engineers under the bus - especially software developers - because I used to be one.  : And I had to learn the hard way about user friendly interfaces instead of engineer/developer friendly interfaces, lol. 

But I just had the process explained to me and I took good notes so now the job is mine, and it's going to require all four of the last four programs be uploaded again - twice each.  So I guess I'd better get started.  Trying hard to open tomorrow!

Thanks again!