Win a Free Copy of Mass Effect II

All you have to do to win a free copy of Mass Effect II is create a page on L33tsauce about the game. Pretty simple right?

Here’s the Dojo about the contest.

Open Beta

For those of you who didn’t get the press release (i.e. most normal, breathing human beings who read blogs and web sites, not news wires), it is now official: L33tsauce is in public Beta.

I’m really excited about how far we’ve come in the past two months of private beta. We’ve worked out a lot of kinks in the system and introduced some really cool new features like the ability to “become a student” of someone else’s Dojo - it’s a nice way to leave a hat tip and, at the same time, bookmark a great resource for later.

We’re constantly thinking about how to bring new and more powerful content creation tools to L33tsauce, making it easier for you to share (and learn) the insides of every new game that hits the shelf.

I invite you to sign up and play with the site.

Add Large Image - new feature in the Dojo Construction HQ on L33tsauce. We’re starting to crank on adding new content types to our Dojos, making it easier to create game-related content like Walkthrus. We’ve got a long, LONG list of features we’re working on, half of them are tweaking & upgrading to existing features (like our image gallery), and others are entirely new. We’ll keep cranking them out, and when we do, we’ll tell you here.

Add Large Image - new feature in the Dojo Construction HQ on L33tsauce.

We’re starting to crank on adding new content types to our Dojos, making it easier to create game-related content like Walkthrus.

We’ve got a long, LONG list of features we’re working on, half of them are tweaking & upgrading to existing features (like our image gallery), and others are entirely new. We’ll keep cranking them out, and when we do, we’ll tell you here.

L33tsauce: A Tale Of Two Solutions

L33tsauce can be a little hard to wrap your brain around. I mean, what is it exactly that we’re trying to accomplish?

The truth is, l33tsauce is an attempt to solve to different problems, for two different audiences, with one little service. Boil it all down, and you’ll find that we’re really trying to do two things:

1. Allows gamers to easily share & get paid for their knowledge
2. Provide an easy-to-use resource for gamers looking to learn

I’ll start with the second problem. Have you ever tried to run the classic TIE Fighter Collector’s CD Edition on your (mostly) modern gaming PC? You know, the one that sports Windows XP?

No? Yeah, OK, I could see that one coming.

But the point is this: if you go searching for even basic how-to information in video games (How to bunny hop in Counter-Strike: Source), you usually won’t find what you went looking for.

How, in today’s Google world, is that frigging possible?

A big chunk of the reason is that all the gaming knowledge on the internet isn’t really structured for knowledge-retrieval. It’s scattered and distributed on millions of pages in thousands of threads in hundreds of forums and blogs, and it’s not really written for search engines in the first place.

Now we get to the first problem: why would anyone worth their salt in gaming bother to share their tips and tricks in an easy-to-enjoy format?

Setting up a blog (well, a blog worth reading) is actually a fair amount of work. And getting people to read it is about twenty times harder. Posting on forums is all well and good, but that’s not really a space that you as an individual have any real control over.

So a blog is too much work, and a forum doesn’t really give you what you need.

Enter l33tsauce. We’ve broken our backs to make sure that putting together content is super easy. Our team of design wizards has everything set up so that it’s pretty right when it comes out of the box, and it’s a page, not a blog, which means that if you write it once…it’s done.

Oh, and the traffic is built in. Not only do our pages land well in Google, but l33tsauce itself is a searchable, navigable site, designed to help the people who want to learn how to run a proper Zerg strategy find exactly the right page from the best of the best of the Zerg masters.

The Beta launch presentation from Mind Camp 2009.

A Rackspace Success Story

Two weeks away from our official Beta launch at MindCamp 6, L33tsauce has landed on Rackspace Cloud Sites. So far, we’ve seen a dramatic improvement in performance, and the whole hosting experience has been totally different from anything I’ve worked with in the past.

We’re a self-funded startup, and at least until the money starts coming in (that’s how it works right? in canvas sacks with dollar signs on them?), we have to be extremely careful about how we spend our dough. But frankly, at this point, I do wish we’d just started out on Cloud Sites, because we’ve spent a good 20+ hours troubleshooting and, ultimately, discontinuing other similarly priced server options.

So for those of you looking to copy l33tsauce start your own web-based venture, here’s a rundown of the low-end server options we tried, and where they took us:

GoDaddy Virtual Dedicated ($26/mo)

Where to start. To be honest, we never really planned to ride the GoDaddy server through any sort of Beta process. It’s ugly, cheap, and totally un-scalable. What we had planned on was being able to use it as a cheap development server for the early phases of the project.

That worked, to a point. Because GoDaddy’s hosting is so cheap (I assume), they put a set of constraints on their systems that you wouldn’t expect to encounter in a dedicated environment, in order to keep spammers from living on GoDaddy servers. The bottom line is we had parts of Drupal acting weirdly, link formats not working, and so on, which meant that we had to hop to a “real” environment sooner than our pocketbook had hoped.

MediaTemple Dedicated Virtual ($50/mo)

This is where we started to encounter real, worrisome problems. My engineer wanted to load us onto a Rackspace account. But, armed with the sales statistics presented by both companies, I argued: Why spend $100/month for half the bandwidth and half the storage space, when we could start out on a twice-generous Media Temple DV server at half the price?

He didn’t know the answer to that question at the time, but we both do now. It turns out that there are other statistics - far more important statistics - that aren’t ever part of the sale. The reason MT can happily offer twice the bandwidth as Rackspace is because their customers will never be able to use the bandwidth.

In our particular case, we were experiences server slowdowns and then crashes with three of us editing CSS, PHP, and creating Dojos. Some of it is our code, very much not optimized, but come on: three people?

I spent some quality time with the MT support team, who to their credit, is very accommodating. But in the end, their answer was: there’s nothing wrong, and there’s no reason your server is crashing.

Clearly that’s not a good enough answer. So I asked a friend of mine, who has forgotten more about server technology than I’ll ever know, to poke around and see what could be discovered. And as far as we were able to tell, our choke point was with the Hard Drive.

Of course!

L33tsauce is a database-intensive site. We knew that going in, and we’ve got plans to smooth out the operation as we grow, but what didn’t occur to us is that in any virtual (or “shared hardware”) environment, we’re going to be sharing hard drive read-write operations with other customers. So we were absolutely clubbing our Virtual Dedicated HDD access.

Go beyond shared hardware at MediaTemple, and you’re talking real money. So off we went to…

Rackspace Cloud Sites ($100/mo)

So far, the experience with Rackspace has been fantastic. Unlike Amazon, Rackspace offers a service called “cloud sites,” which basically means that they do the server management stuff that my team doesn’t know how to do — maintain the LAMP stack, basic security, crap like that. This means that we can, with a few notable exceptions (no SSH / root access), treat this scalable solution as if it were a nice, easy-to-use hosting package from any of our other services.

But the similarity stops there - Rackspace charges over and above the basic plan amount by “compute cycles” rather than (or really, in addition to) bundles of bandwidth and email accounts. As I understand it, this means that I get the same computing power that Posterous does, just in smaller amounts. Awesome.

Three notes about Rackspace:

1. Seven months ago, when I went around asking my friends who currently RUN database intensive, high-traffic sites about what server option to go with, they all told me Rackspace, and I ignored them because I wanted to pay less for hosting. It turns out you get what you pay for.

2. I called support the other night when I was setting up the account, since the interface really is totally different than any other hosting environment I’ve worked with, and a well-spoken human being (name: Daniel) answered the phone. No machine involved. This gives me endless confidence in their ability to support l33tsauce as we grow.

3. I have no idea how quickly we will outgrow our allowance of compute cycles. It’s a brand-new metric of server use for me, and the good thing about it is that it keeps the pressure on us to make sure our code is as tight and efficient as possible.

Today We Start Our Super Early Alpha

It’s an exciting evening for l33tsauce.com - we’ve reached out to a couple of close friends to start early alpha accounts and create the first Dojos. From here on out, what goes up on l33tsauce is real.

Most of the site is still a little broken, unfortunately (that’s why we call it Alpha, right?), but now it’s time to put our seat belts on and get everything ship shape (metaphors, metaphors, I need a lesson on mixing these, don’t I?) for our Beta launch at Mindcamp 6.

We’ve been in development for almost eight months.

It’s been an interesting ride, full of extensions and little surprises, and we’ve actually had to re-write a substantial portion of the Drupal installation we started with.

Why? Mostly because we’ve been laser focused on making a great Dojo creation system. After a lot of work, we’ve got a fully modular system for stuffing pages with text, images, and video — and that’s just the very first of what you’ll be able to use.

It’s really exciting to finally start putting our work in front of real people.

- Jason Preston

See you at MindCamp 6

I’m happy to share that we at l33tsauce.com will be launching our private beta at MindCamp 6 in Seattle on November 21st.

After the months of quiet development work that we at the l33tsauce home offices have been slogging through, it’s almost time to share our newfangled video game site with the world — or at least the portion of the world that will be joining us in late November.

Everyone at the event will get a custom beta invite code, good for one user account, and a snazzy little demo from yours truly showing what exactly l33tsauce is.

- Jason Preston (Squidelf)

What is l33tsauce?

Between Urban Dictionary and Geek Dictionary, there are at least four slightly different definitions of the word “leetsauce.”

For our purposes, leetsauce (or really, l33tsauce) means a web site where gamers can show off their know-how and make a little cash in the process.

We’ll be chronicling the development process, answering user questions, and probably blabbing about video games here, on the official l33tsauce blog. Hope you enjoy.