It feels great to report that we've been able to sustain DAYLIGHT, which is the internal project name for optimal site speed at all times, for a full 3 weeks.

During that time we've experienced 42% traffic growth in all.

For one of the first times, we've initiated a hardware order and cabinet installation that will bring deviantART to full 2N+1 capacity, allowing daylight to continue for the foreseeable future.

We hope you're enjoying the site speed, additional improvements for Europe and Asia are on their way through various content delivery networks whose help we have enlisted.

We've also added 2 engineers to the team, and are seeking out 3 more in the short term. If you're interested in this job, please see the Job Description PDF. With these new additions and the speed increases we are moving to completion on many projects we've attempted through the years.

This will include in no particular order support for the submission of Films, more powerful search, collections, revamp of the message center, a trust metric for better popularity results (no more cheating!), integrated browse & search, proper next/previous navigation (launching I think Monday), the extremely overdue project code named "Party", Chat 1.0, shopping cart redesign, portfolio, a myriad of projects under a milestone called "Friction" that lubricates the user interface and resolves many points of contention with the site from various view points, a revamp of the product pages and Shop, phase2 of deviantWEAR where you can become the designer of your own WEAR and that's mostly it for now.

There aren't many more features we're discussing, we're spending a great deal of time on the core needs of deviantART and making sure we build and rebuild technology that works brilliantly so that all you have to worry about is deviating.

There are many neat tricks hidden in the projects above that I know we're dying to release to all. We take great joy in the successful release of features, the v5 platform continues to serve us very well (even though it was off to a rough start last year). I know I'm often the most eager to release, and try to push as hard as possible for features to see light of day. What I've learned throughout the years that I hope to pass on to a patient, and deviously devious community we love to serve is that these things are no longer trivial feats. If you consider that each piece of software we release is used interactively by 2 million people every day. And if you picture that in the form of football stadiums that house 60,000 at most.... it's a lot of stadiums! About 33 of them!



Anyway, feel free to ask questions below and as always...



-- A