It has been a very busy week! On Tuesday we made our official BETA launch announcement. We got some good press coverage in the Seattle Post Intelligencer (thanks to John Cook for the great article!), the University of Washington Daily, and some other smaller outlets. We have also been working on bugs and finalizing some of the BETA technology.

Right now our highest priority bug is a rendering problem with the site when using Internet Explorer 6. If you visit the website using IE6, the right hand column will fall to the bottom of the page on the home page and My Portfolio page. Approximately 40 percent of our user base is accessing Scriptovia.com using IE6, so we are working as fast as we can to fix this bug. For those of you that are using Internet Explorer 6, I deeply apologize for the inconvenience and I promise to update you via this blog when the problem is fixed.

Other than the bugs, we are working on putting the finishing touches on the document conversion technology that will convert your documents into a format that you can view within your internet browser.

Please continue to send me feedback and bugs. I can be contacted through email, by phone, or you can leave a comment on this post for all to see.

As of a couple hours ago, the limited BETA of Scriptovia has been released. The reason I say “limited” BETA is because all of the BETA features are not yet available. These features including document viewing within the browser, rankings and awards, and badges will be available within the next couple of weeks.

I also can’t stress enough that this is still a work in progress. If you decide to use the site right now you might find many bugs, but most of them have a workaround. Please email me at aseem@scriptovia.com if you find any critical bugs. The reason we decided to release the site with so much missing functionality is because we want to make sure students can use the core components of Scriptovia before the end of the school year.

The data from ThinkEssay (essays, members, and comments) has not yet been migrated into the Scriptovia database. If you are a current member of ThinkEssay, I urge you to wait a couple of days until we get the data migrated before signing up for Scriptovia. This way you can just use your ThinkEssay account with all your old documents and settings.

Let us know what you think and bear with us while we work out the bugs!

Sorry for the lack of blog posts lately, we have been hard at work trying to get the site out the door.

FYI: we have changed the blog URL from blog.scriptovia.com to www.scriptoviablog.com; please change your RSS feeds and bookmarks.

So when can you expect to see the site? Well I can’t promise a date but we are on the home stretch of things. We are working out a few critical bugs and will launch a limited BETA version of the site as soon as the kinks are ironed out. Depending on how quick we work through these problems, we could have something live by the end of the week or three weeks from now. Unfortunately it is hard to tell how much time it will take to work out the bugs since the problems can seem relatively straight-forward on the service but are really deep and dirty bugs. It is just the nature of web development. Anyways I promise to keep you posted and I will try to get more posts on the blog.