March 2013
1 post
Problems with our iOS app
We submitted an iPhone 5 version of the paid version of our app to Apple which had a bug in it that slipped by us and Apple that caused the app to bomb out when you clicked a story. We quickly fixed it, but Apple rejected the update. We have submitted another version again and that was also rejected. It seems we have to make some big changes to the app to satisfy Apple. We can’t really go...
October 2012
1 post
5 tags
.net to .com domain name change
Today, Kick News moved from it’s home at www.kicknews.net to www.kicknews.com. Everything else is currently still the same, however we are almost ready to launch an upgraded backend which should fix some issues with the site not updating. We also will be pushing the new version of our iOS app very soon.
August 2012
1 post
3 tags
More downtime and performance issues
We’d like to start by apologising for the downtime we’ve had over the last few days. We’ve been working really hard to sort the issues out and track down the causes. We’ve made about 15 changes to our setup, including adding a new server to our front end application servers (we use HAProxy as a load balancer), a lot of further database optimisations and we’ve now...
July 2012
3 posts
Leagues and teams
We’ve updated the leagues and teams on the websites and apps. Relegated clubs that are no longer in our current selection of leagues will appear under the Others heading of the Leagues & Teams menu on the website and we’ll be adding them to the apps as well. We also are aware that Huddersfield is currently loading as Hull in the iOS app. This will be sorted as soon as possible and...
Server issues
Just a quick update to apologise for the downtime last week. We had a serious problem with one of our servers, but it caused a cascade and even when we thought we had it fixed it came back again. We’ve removed the problem machine from the pool now and the last few days have been stable. Sorry for any inconvenience caused, we know how important transfer season is.
New version of the iOS app submitted to Apple for...
We’ve just submitted a new version of the iOS app to Apple, which should take roughly a week for them to review. This version is a service release that fixes some issues and makes some overall improvements to the app. We have almost finished a major new feature as well, but that will be in the next update. One thing we have added in this version is the ability to view all the news from all...
June 2012
2 posts
Stability issues
Our traffic has been growing non-stop since we launched the site. In fact, we’re up about 150% for the past month than the same period last year. We’re now servicing around 15 million website and app page views per month. We anticipated a busy transfer season and implemented some changes that have held up quite well (we actually had 100% uptime in May) until last week. One of the...
kicknews.com
Today, we finally got our mitts on kicknews.com. It was first registered 8 years ago, but doesn’t look like it ever had anything on it. We have wanted it since we first started Kick News, so we’re pretty pleased that we managed to get hold of it. We’ll most likely start to redirect from kicknews.net to kicknews.com after the summer transfer window.
October 2011
2 posts
Kick News on iOS 5
There is a problem with the app under iOS 5, which causes it to crash and so we have pulled the app for the time being. An update has been submitted to Apple but we are waiting for them to accept it. It normally takes between 1 and 2 weeks, so we’re hoping it should be sometime this week. The app will be back on the app store as soon as Apple accepts the update.
We’re really sorry for...
3 tags
Changing our domains
We’re in the process of permanently redirecting most of our Kick News club specific domains to our main kicknews.net domain. There are a few reasons for this, but it mostly comes down to Google and consolidating everything into one place. So, for example mancitynews.net will redirect to kicknews.net/premier-league/manchester-city/latest. We know this is a lot longer, but if you type the old...
September 2011
1 post
End of the transfer window
We’re happy to say we experienced record levels of traffic this transfer window. We were getting record traffic, day after day, culminating in the 31st August, when we had 1750% more traffic than the same day last year (which had been a record day for us at the time). Because of this we suffered about 2 hours of down time, while we were tweaking and bashing away at our keyboards, trying to...
July 2011
1 post
3 tags
Kick News went down...
Just wanted to say sorry for the site and apps going down a couple of times in the last few weeks. The past month we’ve had record traffic every few days, but truth be told we weren’t quite ready for it. We’ve been running for a number of years now, but things are really starting to go crazy this transfer window and that brings with it some very lovely problems.
We’ve...
June 2011
3 posts
2 tags
Removing The Sun for Liverpool News
We’re removing The Sun newspaper from www.liverpoolnews.net and from the Liverpool feeds in our apps so as not to offend our Liverpool FC supporting users. We should have done it a long time ago and have only just realised our faux pas.
We had to temporarily pull Kick News for iPhone
Although we tested the new release of Kick News for iPhone thoroughly on our devices and the different versions of iOS in the simulator, it seems that on iOS 3.1 (possible other 3.x version as well), the app bombs out when you click the Clubs menu. We’ve already looked at the crash logs from a device, found the problem and submitted the updated version to Apple, but they take a few days to...
Loads of lovely new clubs on Kick News
So without any fanfare, we launched a lot of new club news pages over the weekend. We’re now carrying news on all football clubs in the English Premier League, English Championship, Scottish Premier League, Major League Soccer as well as the top two teams from Serie A and La Liga. We added a new menu to the site to access them all and we’re going to add some more new features soon....
May 2011
2 posts
6 tags
A sneak peak at Kick News v3.0 for iPhone
We’re not going to give a too much away right now, but there are a few very cool new features coming in v3.0 of Kick News for iPhone. This goes for the free version as well as the club editions. One of the new features we can show you now is the how many new clubs we’re adding. It’s a time consuming process, but we think it’s worth it. Not all clubs will have the same...
5 tags
Welcome to our new blog
Just a quick note to say welcome to our new blog. We’re going to post details of new features when we roll them out, also updates on things you can expect to see soon. When things go wrong, we may even give a bit of a techie explanation for you geeks out there.
We have some new features coming in both our Android and iPhone apps soon, including lots of new teams.
Anyway, more to come...
