Kick News Blog

Problems with our iOS app

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 20:22:50 +0000

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 into details of what the issues are, due to the developer agreements we have with Apple, but we are working on getting the paid version in a state that Apple are happy with it and then releasing the updated free app to have full iPhone 5 support. Sorry for the delays and inconvenience caused.

.net to .com domain name change

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 23:52:58 +0000

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.

More downtime and performance issues

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 23:21:48 +0100

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 moved almost everything into Redis. Our traffic is about 80% higher than during the same period last month and that’s just on the website. The traffic increase from our mobile apps is even higher, so this has caused a lot of extra load. We really couldn’t be happier that the traffic is coming and it’s presented some interesting challenges. We’re just really sorry that it’s meant the downtime on some of the most interesting days of the transfer season so far this year. We’re going to do everything we can to keep on top of the performance to make sure this doesn’t happen again, as our traffic keeps increasing towards the end of the transfer window. Thanks to everyone for your support and patience.

Leagues and teams

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 22:09:05 +0100

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 sorry for any inconvenience caused. In the mean time you can use the following mobile website link: http://m.kicknews.net/championship/huddersfield/latest

Server issues

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 00:56:00 +0100

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 review

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 13:27:00 +0100

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 sources, instead of just a single club or league.

Stability issues

Sun, 01 Jul 2012 01:26:44 +0100

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 changes we made is switching our caching to Redis, which we have rapidly fallen in love with for it’s unbelievable performance. We’ve been making tweaks and changes over the past few days to increase performance and allow us to handle the increase in traffic and think we’ve now got the site stable again. There are still plenty of things we can do if we do continue to have issues though and we’ve got the infrastructure to deal with a lot more requests than we’re dealing with now, it’s just a case of getting our code right. We’re sorry for any inconvenience caused when the site and apps stop working and we wanted to let you know we’re working on it.

kicknews.com

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 23:40:14 +0100

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.

Kick News on iOS 5

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 17:11:17 +0100

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 any inconvenience caused.

We will also be launching a new version of our mobile website in the next few days, which makes it very similar to the iPhone app.

Changing our domains

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 18:38:00 +0100

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 domain you will still be redirected and most people find us with Google or a bookmark anyway, so we can’t see this being a problem.

End of the transfer window

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 15:43:43 +0100

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 find ways of getting more out of our code and servers. We ended up making a few changes that made a big difference and the evening saw everything running fine under the massive load.

We’re not going to take a chance of not being able cope in future, so we’ll be upgrading our servers fairly soon. Hopefully no-one will notice anything, however as we continue to grow you should see less of the “Kick News is under heavy load at the moment” messages, which happens from time to time right now.

We also have a new version of our iOS app submitted to the app store, which should be available for download shortly.

Kick News went down...

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 03:53:00 +0100

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 been optimising our code a lot and the upshot is, we’re just about to publish a new build of the site that shouldn’t have the problems that have taken us down this month. We reckon we can get at least twice as many of our fellow footy fanatic fans on our site and not have any problems, so please feel free to refresh away.

We also want to ask you to point out any news sources that annoy you with overly sensational headlines. We check the site a *lot*, but we can’t read every post and we’re happy to pull blogs that are blatantly just out to get your clicks with nothing to backup their stories. We don’t carry a couple of big football news sites on our network for that exact reason. You can also block news sources you don’t like from your feed via the My Account page (this will be available in the apps soon as well).

Lastly, we have another new build of our mobile apps coming soon, which will be updated across all versions and has some great new features. Enjoy… :)

Removing The Sun for Liverpool News

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 19:19:00 +0100

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

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 10:56:51 +0100

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 review it, so in the mean time, we’ve pulled it from the App Store to make sure as few people as possible are affected by it. We’re really sorry for any inconvenience caused and as soon as Apple have accepted the fixed version, it will be back on the App Store.

Loads of lovely new clubs on Kick News

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 17:32:00 +0100

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. We’re still tweaking some things and trying to make the site go faster, so if you have any problems please feel free to get in contact with us. We promise to be super friendly.

*** Update ***

So, we’ve changed some things around and redone how our adverts load (which we have to have, to pay our bills) and the sites are much, much faster now. We hope you appreciate the extra speed. We know we do. :)

A sneak peak at Kick News v3.0 for iPhone

Sat, 21 May 2011 19:23:00 +0100

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 options available to them right now, but we plan to resolve that by the start of next season. During the transfer window, they will all have the all latest news and transfer info and that’s what is important when there are no games on…

Here are a few screenshots of what the new Clubs menu looks like…

It should be on the App Store in the next week or two. We hope you like it.

Welcome to our new blog

Fri, 20 May 2011 14:39:00 +0100

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 soon…