ArcadeFly is down now while we move from Slicehost to Heroku. It's an amazing platform, and we look forward to seeing how things run on it. My tests so far show it'll be a lot faster than Slicehost -- mainly due to my (inexperienced) rails config on that server. Heroku though, is much easier to maintain, and for a decent price (free until we grow a little more). Luckily we don't get enough traffic to warrant that yet, but 2010 is going to be a much more active year.

I admit, we've been a bit lazy on adding support for multiple browsers. My browser of choice, Firefox 3, is usually all I test in. For the most part this covers 99% of ArcadeFly, but that 2% must really annoy people who use the site in other browsers. Now though, the site should look the same in FF3, Safari, Chrome and IE7. I'm going to give it a once over in FF2 tomorrow, and consider supporting IE6. Since we're lucky enough to use JQuery, getting everything working in IE6 should come down to some CSS tweaks. With a full 20% of our visitors using IE6, this is something we'll definitely be seriously considering. If you come across any layout issues in any browsers other than IE6, please comment on them and we'll do our best to fix them up.

This one has been requested from the start. Now anyone who's signed in has the ability to add new games to ArcadeFly! These still will have to be confirmed by an administrator, but after that they'll be public on the site. If you've ever been adding an arcade and come across game not listed, this one is for you. You'll be able to create the game, and add it to the arcade right away. The game won't show up publicly in the games list for that arcade until the game itself is approved, but it will show up in the "edit games" page for an arcade to whoever edits it (so hopefully there shouldn't be any stepping on each others toes). Also when logged in users are managing games at an arcade, all games that are in the system will be available -- pending or approved. So if someone else has recently added a game, and it has not yet been approved it will show up in there. If there's any questions or problems with how this system works, feel free to comment here or send in your questions through the GetSatisfaction page for ArcadeFly.

Tags are just about the easiest thing possible to implement, especially in Ruby on Rails. With great plugins out there like acts_as_taggable_on_steroids, getting tags setup is a breeze. We've actually been accepting tags since day on arcades, but you couldn't view a listing of all arcades tagged with a specific tag. Now all tags should be links that show a listing of arcades -- making one more way to find the arcade you're looking for, or discover a new one. For instance, if you're looking for all arcades that are at theme parks or arcades in movie theaters it's only a click away!

I'm going to try to update the blog more with some bug fix releases to keep people up to date with what's going on. The release for today is on the small side though. The profiles and arcades section have a "show arcades/profiles within so many miles" drop down, where you can select 10,20 up to 5000 miles -- or everywhere. This wasn't working due to the weird way we were using Geokit. The changes made to get this working are available on my fork of geokit-rails.

We took it relatively easy in December, but we have a load of new features and goals set for the new year. This is the year ArcadeFly is really going to take off! If you think you have an awesome feature that would help us, or you think you can help out please either go ahead and do it or feel free to fill out the feedback form that's on the side of each page. We're always looking for help! A few small changes went out this evening:

• Added timestamps to arcades and arcades at a game. This was something highly requested, as it made it difficult to tell how up to date information was
• Updated manage arcade games page to order games by name.
• Working on the ability to filter for arcades within a given range. Looks like there are a few bugs with it so it may not work right now, but it shouldn't error out.
• Added the count of how many of a specific game are at an arcade. This info was collected, but not shown due to an error.

Know of an issue? Have a suggestion? Use the Feedback widget on side of every page!

We've been seriously lacking good pinball support for a while now, but I started off our Pinball integration with the current list from Wikipedia. There are a number of sites out there with far more complete lists, but for now we're going with a light list of the most popular. Our goal is to list every game that's available to play at an arcade, not every game that could be available, so importing 5,000 pinball games from

We recently fixed most the bugs currently on ArcadeFly. There's a few in the works, but nothing major outstanding. We recently upgraded to Rails 2.2 with Passenger instead of Mongrel. Things are really coming along though and become stable enough to build on. We're planning on expanding out to some new features in the coming weeks, but still looking for suggestions on where to place our focus. If you see any problems with the way things are now, please email me or just reply to this post. We're looking into some better ways of tracking bugs, but the free ones don't seem to compare).

Thanks to a pair of posts on Arcade Heroes and Destructoid, we're slowly building some real momentum now. It's been a bust week with a lot of updates, but things are looking good. You can now claim arcades and, upon approval, edit them. I'm actively approving claims whenever I see them, so don't be scared to claim 10 or 20 arcades if you go to all of them. Also, we're actively looking for administrators to help out across the boards. Administrators will help make sure the game listings are up to date and without duplicates, as well as approve claims, edit any arcade, and probably more once abilities are in. If you're interested in really helping out in the long haul, and don't mind if includes the occasional tedius bit of data entry (like entering the games available at contact with us if you're interested.

As things start to be used it's always easier to flesh out what should be improved. For this week that has been the games list. After taking a tour of Orlando I ran into a surprising number of games that weren't in the GameFaqs listing that we're using here. The solution is to move off gamefaqs as the definitive listing for games. You'll notice that the URLs no longer use the gamefaqs ids as the URL parameters. It's just not a good idea to base your system that much on another one of which you have no control. Plus, as I was going arcade to arcade I was noticing other items that we might want to track (pool tables, air hockey, basketball, etc) that just wouldn't fit into the mold if we required all games to exist on gamefaqs. As for the games that aren't on GameFaqs, we'll soon be adding all games from the Killer List of Video Games as well. It's just about ready, but I'm running into a problem with game names that are similar but not exactly the same. After I write up a script to merge the differences between these two we should have another 1,000 or so games available.