Like a towering ship toward the prow of which an inverted bottle of champagne is purposively descending, the new incarnation of The Run of Play is almost ready to be named, photographed, and piloted away from the spattered duchess and clapping relatives. Seriously, we are about to launch this thing, but before we do, I’d like to bring some volunteers on board to push the buttons and make sure the coffee machine doesn’t scramble the F-16s. If it does, you get to be the one to tell the president about Iowa.
In other words: we are looking for beta testers. The idea is to round up 20 or so readers to come in for a sneak preview of the new site, spot what’s wrong with it, and let us know so that we can fix the problem before anybody’s mom gets home. We’re looking for volunteers with a variety of technical backgrounds, so don’t be deterred if you aren’t a php developer (sound advice generally, I’ve found). We also need a variety of browsers and operating systems, so if you’re a Mac user, it’s finally time to proclaim that fact with a sense of superiority and confidence.
If you’re interested, send an email to beta@runofplay.com. Be sure to mention your browser/OS and, if you think of it, your approximate level of technical expertise (“am kept alive by advanced bionics”, “once watched a commercial for The Clapper”). We’ll wait a couple of days for the responses to come in, then send out an email with further instructions. The test will run for a further couple of days, and then, with any luck, everything should be ready to go by our target launch date of January 24, 2937.