Hogwarts Live Blog

Hello everyone, I know you all have been anticipating the new upgrade of Hogwarts Live. It will be a stable release, meaning it will be virtually bug-free, and it will have a lot of new features to boot. The official release date is Monday, May 23, 2005. The site may go down periodically from the 18th-23rd because of the update, just a warning. ^_^

"Video gamers are not loners, they are team players. Video gamers are not afraid to talk to people they don't know, cold calls are not an issue for them. They share knowledge. Video gamers are not lazy. They are resilient, hard-working provided the environment (the game) is fun and challenging. Video gamers do know what failing means even if you can argue they only know about virtual failures. None the less, they feel the pain and know how to rebound."
--John. C. Beck and Mitchell Wade, "Got Game: How the Gamer Generation Is Reshaping Business Forever"

Well, I didn't place in the competition. I was pretty disappointed but oh well; I'm trying to win a scholarship right now. The scholarship is a lot more important. I'm saddened to say that the judges at the national competition did not understand what I was talking about and they seemed pretty bored with my presentation. I had a chance to look at some of the winners' site, not very impressive, but that is just my opinion and obviously not the one that matters.

All of my competitors used commercial software meaning they paid for it while I modified some open source e-commerce software and actually got my hands dirty.

If you want to look at my site visit:
http://www.usharrypotter.com/surfnsun
It is pretty bland but so were the other websites, but we scored extremely high in the technical area of the sites in contrast to our presentation score.

UPDATE: I finished the scholarship you can view it at http://www.usharrypotter.com/mg/

I will be in Anaheim, California for an E-Commerce competition from April 21-28. Wish me luck. ^_^

Arch Auror Errol has been promoted to Deputy Headmaster Errol. I have been in need of more help (especially since AstarianJewel and Inee left) for quite some time, and I am glad to say I have finally found someone I can trust. On a further note the next version of Hogwarts Live will be released in about two months.

I will be gone from March 30 to April 4 because I am going up to Northern Utah to see some friends of mine. I will also be taking today and tomorrow (March 29) off because I need to finish all my assignments for school before I leave. Sorry, in advance if this proves to be an inconvenience for anyone.

If you get stuck or your account gets frozen whatever you want to call it, please take note of the area in which you got stuck in before petitioning the staff. Also, please try to avoid the area you got stuck in after we fix your account. I am aware of various locations that are needed to play the game such as the Forbidden Forest, the Clan Halls, and the Dueling Club that have bugs, I will try to have these worked out by April.

Thanks.

I know I said there shouldn't be anymore database connection errors but this one was not caused by something else. The problem is still unfixed, though I can easily bring back the game I still do not know what SPECIFICALLY is causing the database to crash. Yup it crashed and then shut me out so I couldn't log in and fix the problem till today. If it goes down you can always try http://www.usharrypotter.com/forums.ushp and post the problem there, cause I was not immediately aware of the site going down.

You may have noticed that A LOT and I mean A LOT of features of the game are missing, I had to deactivate a lot of stuff in order to figure out, which modules are slowing down the site. Please be patient!

Fortunately, I have finally transferred the Hogwarts Live database to the new server! What does this mean? Well for one you should experience A LOT LESS downtime, that means this site SHOULD be up most all of the time!