In the early hours of Friday, September 26th, 2008, years of ambition and months of hard work personified itself in an unorthodox manner… I’d like to introduce you to Mighty Ape:

Mighty Ape is our new online shopping site, built from the ground-up to a be complete replacement for Gameplanet Store, which launched five years ago in September, 2003.

The biggest surface upgrade that Mighty Ape introduces is the introduction of books and toys to our range. Our team is passionate about both and I believe that we have already become one of the best online options for New Zealand consumers in both categories.

Technically speaking, Mighty Ape has been a massive challenge. The addition of books has seen to this, as the sheer scale of the book range means that things need to be as optimized as possible instead of just “good enough”. (With GP Store we could get away with this somewhat, thanks to a relatively tiny product database.) The end product is something many times more complicated than GP Store, and the fact that you can’t really tell the difference is something I’m proud of. It can a little irritating that most people don’t seem to see Mighty Ape as complex project compared to GP Store, but hopefully the fact that we’ve lost no speed despite the additions is an indication that we’ve done it right.

It’s been a week and a half now since Mighty Ape launched, and so far it’s holding up well. We installed a fast new server last week to help with the extra load has been generated and although our web team is working flat out to fix things, it’s nothing that we can’t handle. Overall, I’m very very proud of what we have achieved.

For the science buffs and technical boffins curious as to how Mighty Ape came to be, the following diagram illustrates the evolution of the GP Stoiran (2003-2008) into the Mighty Ape creature:

The beta version of Google Chrome became available this morning, and it’s definitely worth trying out. It’s not quite good enough to pull me entirely from Firefox yet, but it definitely has enormous potential. For now I’ll be using it for casual browsing whilst staying with Firefox for work.

Our new online shopping site currently in development seems to work flawlessy… that was expected, considering Chrome is based on WebKit, but given that we’re getting very close to launch (honest!) I’m pleased to say that IE6 remains the only browser that I hate.

Simon pointed out that Chrome gives very little weight to the web page’s title. Because Chrome has a minimalistic look about it, the classic “File / Edit / View” bar and application title are nowhere to be seen. Furthermore, the tabs cut off page titles after around 20 characters, so page titles like “Gameplanet Store NZ - Buy DVDs, DVD movies, PS2, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Nintendo DS, Wii, and PC games online.” are suddenly extremely useless for all purposes other than search engines. Interesting decision.

It’s been a really long time since I’ve worked on any web project for myself, but quite some time ago I had an idea for an online workout logging application; something you can use to keep track of your gym workouts and see how much weight you’re lifting and how your progress is going.

Last week I got a prototype of the site online at strengthfu.com; it’s not open to the public just yet, but if you want to be the first to know when sign-ups are open then please register your interest on the site.

I’ll have more news on this soon.

Who says golf is boring? Tiger Woods’ U.S. Open win this week caused measurable traffic spikes in the U.S.A., with numerous ISPs apparently initially believing the spikes to be a denial of service attack.

You can read the full story here, but here’s the summary:

Starting around 9 am Pacific and peaking at 1:30 pm yesterday, many ISPs noticed an unusual increase in traffic. At first, a few security engineers worried they were under some type of new DDoS attack. But the flood of traffic did not appear directed at any individual customer — the gigabits of anomaly traffic surged to almost all customers from multi-national banks to the bakery down the street and home DSL / Cable users. For several ISPs, traffic into their network grew by 15-25%. In one provider, inbound traffic nearly doubled.

It turns out that the U.S. Open played at Torrey Pines yesterday generated one of the larger Internet-wide flash crowds this year. Traffic dipped and peaked corresponding to Tiger’s initial
misses and subsequent spectacular comeback as millions of office bound fans tuned in to the live NBC and ESPN coverage.

Firefox 3 is out today. I urge you to download it.