Stabilizing Changes

Those of you who are regulars here may have noticed some flakiness and downtime, and there's a good reason for it. I've been busy in the past couple weeks upgrading the underlying technologies, improving my admin console I use to maintain the site, and setting up the ability to add new features without much trouble. One of which has already shipped.

Since the beginning, I've wanted to ship a feature that shows the different variants of an album and it's finally here! When viewing a record, the system will (usually) show a few albums that are similar. Often these are variants of the same record, but sometimes they're other albums by the same artist.

Changes often carry risks and changing Vinyl Deals is no different. For example, one of the changes this week dramatically increased the amount of bot traffic to the wrong place, so that had to be mitigated.

There's still more changes in the hopper and those will roll out slowly. Most of them are under the hood, but should result in a better experience. Someday I want to do a visual redesign, but that's too big of a risk at this point.

Thanks as always for using Vinyl Deals. I hope it's been helpful.