What's taking so long?

It's about time we told you what the status of iCheckMovies 2.0 is, don't you agree? We're going to do that in a minute, but let us explain first what is taking us so long to get there.

Growing pains

When we started this website, we didn't have a clue about its future. We just wanted to make something we believed in, something fun. The first version basically looked liked the site you're looking at now. But under the hood, much has changed.

Last week we welcomed our 30,000th user, something we didn't dare dream of in the beginning. We are very pleased with our growing community and are doing our best to please you as much as we can. But this growth has also caused us some pains: we had to update and expand our server park, upgrade our hosting and rewrite a lot (a lot, lot) of code.

Some problems were so urgent and obvious that we had to pause our work on version 2.0. But this is not a bad thing, oh no. We've used these lessons to further improve on this beautiful site and make it prepared for the next 30,000 users. Let me rephrase that: the next 30 million users.

To infinity and beyond

iCheckMovies 2.0 was initially going to be version 1.0+: a bunch of new features and an enlargement of our movie database. Along the way we decided to do something much better.

We decided to optimize the hell out of our code, to make the website a lot faster, user friendly and easier to update. We improved upon the layout, changed the URL structure and built a unified system of displaying data. We added lots of features, which basically will transfer the power from us to you, the user.

No more asking us to add a list, since you will able to do that yourself. No more missing movies, since you will be able to add anything that is available on IMDB.com. You can even decide to join or create a group to celebrate your love for a genre, actor, movie or director.

The new website will be a joy to use, trust us.

The times they are a-changin'

So that is what was taking us so long. We don't like to do things by halves.

But… all these changes will have some implications. We invested a lot of money, effort and time into this project, and will even more in the future. To compensate for that, we're going to introduce paid accounts.

We can't exactly disclose what that means yet, but in short: you will be having the option to upgrade your account to use more and better features. Of course, the basic functionality will remain free (as in beer).

In the coming weeks we will invite some of you to help us test the new website. We will also announce more details, right here on the blog.