Hello all!





The 3rd major revision of allkpop.com is finally here, and we hope you like it as much as we do.





However, we are still in a beta phase and many more features will be added as we roll out incremental updates over the upcoming weeks.





With that said, K-Pop is a very visual form of art, and we wanted to reflect that in the redesign of allkpop. With the advancement of higher resolutions, we decided to utilize all of that extra screen space, resulting in a greater visual experience. You'll see bigger, bolder, and more beautiful photos throughout the site and we're hoping the improved visual layout creates a more enjoyable experience for you all.





Community is also a key feature, therefore we've incorporated a lot of extras to take communications with other fans to the next level. For instance, with all activity you partake in on the site, you will be rewarded with "Activity Points", which you will be able to spend on items and eventually some physical merchandise.





On top of that, we've incorporated a music player to round out the entire K-Pop browsing experience. In terms of music catalog, we are working hard to incorporate a good variety of music, but that will require a bit of time, as we finalize legal licensing of songs with all of the labels who are willing to participate.





Any questions, bugs and feedback can be provided to us in the forums here.





Finally, a FAQ will be coming soon to cover all of the new features of the site. For now, take a look around and we hope you enjoy the newest iteration of allkpop.com!





Thank you,

Johnny





UPDATE (5.20.13 @ 2:24am)

First off, I want to personally apologize to everyone for the recent instability of allkpop.com. The new allkpop project was a huge undertaking, and although there are bugs, we are working overnight to fix all of the major issues.

However, the major issue was with our new server architecture. We were short-sighted in that not only were we developing allkpop from scratch, but we also re-architected the entire server environment. This added to the complexity of the project and created additional levels of issues, many that we did not foresee. For instance, the Hybrid-Cloud environment we decided to run, caused unforeseen issues, which we spent the last 72 hours to correct and in the end, ditched the Hybrid environment, to go back to a full on dedicated cluster (Talk about a time-sink, we know, we've been living at the office this entire weekend).

That should explain the constant back-and-forth we had to do between the new platform and the legacy platform.

With that said, we are almost past all of the crazy obstacles, and we are finally approaching the home stretch. The site will still be quite laggy, as we iron out and optimize the code throughout the night. But on a brighter note, the worst is over now.

I know many of you rely on us for 24/7 coverage of K-Pop news and we let you down, and for that I am deeply sorry. Moving forward we will exercise greater caution on all future updates and rolling out of site features.

Thank you for being patient with us and for being so supportive of what we do here.

Although we're still figuring things out, I can promise you that things will be better in the upcoming days.

-Johnny





UPDATE (5.21.13 @ 10:35pm)

We are LIVE!





-Johnny







