MotorsportReg.com Blog

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Mobile application by Torqued Racing

June 11, 2013 by admin

One of our customers, Torqued Racing Solutions, has been quickly putting together a mobile application to scratch an itch. In owner Shawn Fultz's words:

We were looking for a way to access our MotorsportReg.com event registration information on the go and at the track. We couldn't find anything on the market so we built it!

The application is in beta right now and supports the following features:

View registrations for any event

View driver and vehicle information

View/enter notes for driver or other meetings

Check in drivers (Note: at the moment, this is local to the app and not a feature of MSR, but is something we're working on)

Download data from MotorsportReg.com so that it will work offline

Check out a quick video:

This is not a Pukka Software or MotorsportReg.com product so we can't take any official credit nor provide support for it. However, we're working with Shawn so that he has the necessary tools from us to build something great using our REST API. We're really excited about his work!

See more at torquedracingsolutions.com.

Topics: Customers, Misc, API

Hardware migration tonight, Saturday Feb 5th

June 11, 2013 by admin

Beginning at 10:10pm Pacific time tonight, MotorsportReg.com will be in maintenance mode for up to four hours while we migrate the production system to newer, faster hardware. Unfortunately (at least in the maintenance window respect), we are transitioning between 32-bit and 64-bit servers and we are unable to bring up the new database server in parallel. This database dump, transfer and reload is why we have the longer allocated timeframe.

We have been testing for the past two months including several large scale load tests and are excited to report that not only are they much faster, they have plenty of headroom to continue handling our explosive growth.

At all times during the transition tonight, users will be provided a maintenance message so they will not be left wondering if your links are broken or your events are offline. We have also preemptively lowered our DNS time-to-lives so that upon successful testing, full DNS transition will take only a few minutes rather than the 48-72 hours typically associated with an IP address change.

During the transition, we will be updating our official status page at http://status.MotorsportReg.com and Twitter @pukkasoft as needed. Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have questions.

For the technically minded out there, we're upgrading to Enterprise-class machines with 2 x Quad-Core 2.4ghz Xeon processors, 16GB RAM and completely redundant RAID arrays of 15,000RPM SAS disks to ensure data protection. As always, we continue to use an enterprise-level colocation facility with the expected redundant power, fire, cooling and physical security. It costs more, but it's how we maintain an average of approximately 1 hour of downtime per year.

June 11, 2013 by admin

All aboard! More than 230 organizations using MotorsportReg.com

Putting together a list of customers recently, the final tally counts 234 unique organizations have held events with MotorsportReg.com since January 2008. With the exception of a few groups who are now defunct due to the economy, we still manage events for every one of these groups. Our customer loyalty is a huge source of pride for us here at Pukka Software so thanks for picking and sticking with us!

In case you've missed it, we announce every new customer on our Facebook page as well as our Twitter feed. If you're interested in keeping up with us, take a look at both places and consider staying in touch there as well.

Topics: Customers, Marketing

Our first million-dollar month

June 11, 2013 by admin

We crossed a major threshold last night. In the thirty-one days of May, MotorsportReg.com managed more than $1.1 million dollars of payments including our single-biggest 24-hour period on record of $70,164.50. That's 137 different organizations running 325 events taking 7,766 registrations. And to think six years ago this was just a part-time hobby with three customers...

June 11, 2013 by admin

Justin Hall's MotorsportReg.com-sponsored Spec Miata at the 2008 RunOffs

Spotted at the 2008 SCCA National RunOffs at Heartland Park in November: previous Spec Miata Challenge winner, Koni Challenge and World Challenge racer Justin Hall's Spec Miata lining up to do battle. Motor issues kept him out of contention in qualifying but he fought back from a 15th starting position to finish 6th overall. Photo by Paul Zimerman Race Photos.

June 11, 2013 by admin

I think everyone has a project where something is nagging them. There's something you know you need to do but either you aren't looking forward to it or you're busy with other priorities so you put it off. Eventually though, you wind up taking care of it and it's as though a weight has been lifted off your shoulders! The sweet sound of silence, be it mental or verbal, when you are no longer distracted by the nag is a wonderful moment.

About two weeks ago we pushed out two "relatively minor" updates to our member merger. When people forget they have an account on MotorsportReg.com or they can no longer access the email address they used, they often create a second (or third, or fourth...) account. For accuracy, we usually want to reduce this down to a single active account per member so we offer an account combining tool. This worked well for merging a single duplicate membership but it didn't know how to merge members that had multiple overlapping club memberships. This wasn't a problem early on but over time it became more and more common resulting in more accounts that could not be merged.

Operationally it's not such a big deal as you can flag one of those accounts as inactive and for all intents and purposes simply ignore it. But... it nagged me. I knew it should work. It could work. But it's a messy process that I wasn't looking forward to revisiting.

When we released our major update a couple of months ago, I was given the opportunity (or forced, depending on your point of view) to review and update the code to handle our newest features. When I was finished, I had a piece of code I was really excited about (yes, we engineer types do get excited about such things). We copy ourselves on notification emails when accounts are joined together and we also receive reports when merges fail to complete. We used to get a lot of those failure emails. You can imagine the sweet inner peace I have found now that the merge tool successfully merges all but a single indeterminate scenario (when both accounts are registered for the same event).

Organizers once again have full and complete control and I have a little more focus for the next project on my list.

Topics: Features