The LIVESTRONG.COM Blog

As you may know, LIVESTRONG.COM was overwhelmed with traffic thus far this year, thanks to thousands of new members who’ve likely made New Years resolutions to live a healthier 2009. Our dedicated tech team were able to make some server and code adjustments to restore stability and speed to the site earlier this week.

But, as part of those fixes, they had to cache some data on the MyPlate screen of The Daily Plate. This was a temporary measure, and it has had the effect of making some of the weekly and monthly totals on the lower half of your MyPlate screen lag behind. It’s our intent to restore full functionality to those totals by the end of the day today.

Caching those numbers definitely made them less useful, but it also enabled us to get the site running much more smoothly, which we felt was a worthwhile trade-off. 

Again, it’s our aim to get the MyPlate weekly/monthly totals fully restored by end of the day.

Thanks, as always, for your patience and support!

As you may have noticed, LIVESTRONG.COM has suffered from slowdowns and stability issues over the past 48 or so hours.

We expected a big influx of new users at the start of the year. As folks make New Years resolutions to lose weight and get healthy, it’s not surprising that they would choose LIVESTRONG and The Daily Plate to get started. Still, we were stunned by the massive barrage of new members we’ve had sign up over the past few days.

We’d thought we were prepared for the extra resources necessary, but we were unfortunately clearly unprepared for just how popular we’d become.

Our systems team and developers have been working tirelessly to get things running more smoothly, and have made great strides. Things are already running a lot better, though you’ll likely note some mild slowness for the next few hours while thousands of your fellow members track the foods they’ve been trying to log for days!

Thanks so much for your patience and support. Remember, you can always know what we’re working on by checking out The LIVESTRONG List.

As you may know, our product team, designers, and developers are constantly toiling away on improvements to LIVESTRONG.COM. We’re always hard at work on new features and bug fixes alike. But it’s not always easy for you, our members, to know what’s exactly on our plates at any given time.

We hope to change that with the launch of The LIVESTRONG List, a page devoted to listing out everything we’re working on. We’ll do our best to keep it current and complete, and you’ll have a better sense of what we’re working on!

Take a look, and enjoy!

Our astounding development team rolled out a major upgrade to our Dares system late last night (or early this morning), and we’re pretty excited about it.

Check out the Dares directory to see all the dares available. Most dares will have a custom tracker to help track your daily progress as you work to achieve whatever it is you’ve dared to do.

You’ll note right away that Dares are now more community-based, and each individual dare is centered on a unique group. For example, take a look at our hugely popular “Dare to Lose Weight” page.

Most Dares now have a custom tracker to help track your daily progress.

As part of yesterday’s batch of bug fixes, we made some tweaks to the MyPlate page. Unfortunately, one of those tweaks has left some of you confused!

In previous incarnations, MyPlate had a search box in the middle of the page. You could use that search box to search for foods you’d eaten and fitness activities you’d engaged in. To get the most important information on MyPlate higher up on the page, we removed that search box. But don’t worry, you can still search The Daily Plate for what you ate!

You’ll just want to use the search box at the top of every page of the site:

When “The Daily Plate” is highlighted under the search box like it is in that screenshot, it functions identically to the search that used to be in the middle of the MyPlate page. 

Hope this helps!

We’ve rolled out another major release, full of bug fixes and feature enhancements. Here we go:

1. Time zone preferences weren’t working properly on LIVESTRONG.COM. Users who added foods to MyPlate for “today” would have them end up on “tomorrow” or “yesterday” instead, because our system wasn’t respecting the time zone you’d set. This is now, mercifully, fixed!

2. Images weren’t properly syncing from TheDailyPlate.com to LIVESTRONG.COM. They now should be syncing, at least once a day.

3. MyPlate now shows more of the important content you care about (your foods you’ve tracked!) higher up on the page.

4. TDP Mobile is now working better.

5. The “Foods I Added” module on user profiles wasn’t working properly. It’s fixed now!

6. Favorites now work better on your profile

You’ll note we’ve made various other interface refinements and fixes as well, and there’s another batch due next week. Stay tuned, and as always, please let us know what you think!

Our developers have been working as hard as ever, and last night they rolled out our biggest release since launch, containing dozens of fixes, features, and improvements. Here’s a sampling:

1. Better Group categorization. Now, when browsing groups, you can drill down by category into subcategories.

2. Better MyPlate layout. We’ve improved the layout for those of you who use The Daily Plate to track the foods you eat each day. By removing an ad, we’ve gotten the important data you care about higher up on the page. More improvements for that page are in store!

3. Fix for profile links from Forums. There had been a glitch with linking from usernames on the forums to a member’s profile. That has been fixed.

4. Vitamin / supplement page improvements. Some links from those pages hadn’t been working properly; they now are.

5. Increased limit for length of Group posts. Some members wished they could write longer missives in Group blogs and comments. We’ve upped the limit on post-size by a big margin. Write away!

6. Search improvements. You’ve no doubt realized that LIVESTRONG.COM has simply tons of content. We discovered not all of our article categories were appearing in search results when you search the site with that bar at the top. That’s now corrected!

7. Video player refinements. We’ve tweaked the video player we use on the site to make it a bit sleeker.

8. WYSIWYG text editor for Groups. WYSI-what now? Don’t worry, some of our own staffers didn’t know that term. It stands for “What You See Is What You Get,” and it refers to a fancier text editor that resembles Microsoft Word. That’ll make posting in Groups even easier, since you can use nice formatting without needing to know a lick of HTML. (Note that our current WYSIWYG editor doesn’t work in all browsers. If your browser doesn’t support it, you’ll just see a regular text entry box.)

UPDATE: There had been an issue with posting replies to Group posts. That has since been resolved.

There are plenty more under-the-hood fixes, and we’re working on a lot more. We’ll be posting a nice long list with everything we’re working on soon, which should help you stay informed about what’s coming here on the site. We value your feedback; let us know what you think!

Hi everyone!

You might have thought our team would take a break after last week’s round of fixes, but there’s no stopping the LIVESTRONG.COM crew! We rolled out another smattering of upgrades and fixes this week; here’s a sampling:

1. We’ve made LIVESTRONG Groups better than ever. They now sport an easier-to-read three-column layout. You can also post links to other sites and resources into your group entries with a really slick new tool that I think you’ll love. Groups also load much, much faster than ever before. Explore, and enjoy!

2. You might have already noted the new search bar in the header that we released last week. Now, we’ve refined search — especially “Member Search” — so that the results are even more accurate.

3. We’ve made several bug fixes on The Daily Plate. Some members were having issues viewing their weight charts; viewing date ranges wasn’t working properly. That should now be corrected. We’ve also implemented some new measures to cut down on new duplicates entering the database. And today, we’re introducing “Locked” food items. When we independently verify the accuracy of food data, we’ll mark the food as such and prevent it from being edited later. While most food items have a button to “Edit this item,” locked foods – like this one — don’t.

4. Beyond these changes, we’ve improved the layout of some articles, improved our video experience, added an “Experts” module to our homepage, and more. 

Take a look around the site to experience the changes, and let us know what you think!

A bunch of new features and fixes went live today! Here are some that you may find of interest:

First up, for those of you who use TDP on LIVESTRONG, we’ve added a great feature that’s easier to use than to explain — but I’ll still try! If you click “I Ate This!” and then choose “other” to enter a date of your own choosing (instead of “today” or “yesterday”), that new date will appear again the next time you click “I Ate This.” That way, if you have a bunch of foods to enter for, say, two days ago, you can get it done a lot more quickly!

You can now choose to subscribe to our experts’ blogs. Visit one of their blogs now, and you can choose to be notified every time they post a new entry.

You’ll also notice a revamped search bar in the header. Now you can easily choose whether to search the whole site, just The Daily Plate, or just for members. And over on the Forums, you can find a forum-specific search near the top right of the page. The site is also better about remembering your searches (so that you don’t have to retype the whole query if you want to refine your search).

We’ve made a variety of fixes to the Excel exports you can generate from MyPlate. If you’ve been having issues with them, try again!

Also on MyPlate, we’ve corrected some issues where meals you had tracked could lose their timestamps in certain scenarios.

A variety of other fixes and upgrades also launched today, and we have plenty more fixes in the works. We had intended to role out some upgrades to Groups today, but we had to hold off at the last minute, so that we can make sure we get everything right. Expect that upgrade soon!

As always, let us know what you think in the comments below. We sincerely appreciate your feedback!