Getting Better & Why We Don’t Google Adword You 

Hello Cool Fans,

I thought it was high time we took a couple of minutes to let you know more about what we’ve been up to lately. Though you may not realize it we upload changes to the site every night during our low traffic periods. 95% of these changes you wouldn’t notice without being told, but each of them helps to solidify our technical foundation and ensure that we are providing you the best experience possible.

You see our goal from the onset of this effort has been to create a user experience that was as easy and painless as possible.  We looked at other sites on the web and specifically designed Cool Hand Nuke so that it would rise above the norm and give our members that absolute best in content and experience.

For us that meant that anything we found annoying in other sites, would automatically be excluded from Cool Hand Nuke regardless of whether or not it was a supposed to be a money maker.  So you won’t see Google Adwords on our site or get random solicitations for Viagra purchases or anything else.

Simple, Clean, Secure. 

That’s what we are striving for and I think we do a pretty good job meeting that standard most days.  To that end we have a road map that we are following to help us give you what we believe you want and what you need; but unfortunately we make mistakes.  We miss things after having worked on this site for so long.  Put simply we can develop a blind spot.  

That’s where you come in, the Cool Hand Nuke community member.  When you give us feedback, it helps us to make the site better for you.  Point in case, Rose Chang of PG&E fame gave us a bit of feedback that most would think too simple to be worth mentioning. 

However, we’d been staring at this system for so long that it simply escaped us.  Specifically we have designed the registration system to use your email address as your user id. 

We did this for all community members, jobseekers and recruiters.  The reason being that we thought too many sites are out there now, too many user ids.  Let’s keep it simple.  Use your email.  Never have to worry about remembering that your login was Jamie27xyt18. 

Simple, right?  No problem?

Well, we didn’t think to spell out E-mail address on the login page rather than Username. 

We understood them to be the same thing; but it took a community member to point out that many, if not most, people could be confused by this oversight.  She was right.  So we changed it and we changed it as soon as we could, because it is important to us that you have the best experience possible.

No Sugar Coating Here.

We’ve had our share of problems.  After we made our initial move from private to public beta we experienced a series of server errors that we could not have imagined.  So we worked day and night to track down the problem and correct our mistakes as quickly as we could.  

We talked about rolling back the site, taking it offline but finally decided that it is being built for you and that we are getting the best data possible, live data, so that in the end the pain felt would be worth it for all of us but especially for you.

Fact is, we have gotten better.  Significantly better.  I feel confident in that, just as I feel confident in saying that we are nowhere near, where we need to be; but we are getting there. 

I personally login first thing every morning to check the error logs from the previous night and I check them almost hourly on a daily basis.  So I know the frequency with which they have occurred and I am happy about some of the trends that I have seen, but I will not be happy until I see multiple days with no errors reported.  That will be when we have accomplished something. 

Until then stick with us & Stay Cool!

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