WheelOYum.com History

A Brief Synopsis of WheelOYum.com's Metamorphosis

The main driving factors behind the changes to WheelOYum.com are to support a completely web-driven service, and to improve the site's design.

First and foremost, the Wheel 'O Yum service is now available completely online.
No downloading, installing, and configuring a server. No distributing to all your friends and coworkers, followed by setting each one up. (Well, not unless you want to of course.)

The Wheel 'O Yum's client-server software architecture has always been accepted and understood by the technical crowd. But as it gained adoption by less computer savvy individuals, the confusion--and eventually--fustration increased.

The Wheel 'O Yum was originally designed to support multiple users in a single group. This is still the essence of the Wheel 'O Yum, but it required each group to be setup individually.

This new form of delivering the Wheel 'O Yum removes the burden of setting up and administering the Wheel 'O Yum server (a daunting task for most people). This most recent change builds on the existing framework to support multiple users in multiple groups.

Supporting multiple groups was a fairly straightforward task. A bigger challenge was supporting a full-blown application service provider (ASP) model where the website and backend servers work together. This involved supporting a database store (instead of flat XML files) on the server side as well as the website infrastructure (user accounts, profiles, transparent access to the Wheel 'O Yum administration and end-user program, etc).

This new delivery model also allows some of the most-requested features to be added, like automatic restaurant listings of your local area.

Needless to say, the drastic reduction in dedicated server hosting prices since the Wheel 'O Yum first began enable us to provide the service for free to users (we're absorbing the hosting costs).

The second driving force for the change was many visitors felt the old wheeloyum.com website could use some improvement in design and layout.
We've tried to offer a cleaner, simpler (not to mention more colorful) website that focuses less on the techno-babble and more on the user.

What do you think?

We continually strive to improve our service and satisfy our users.
If you have any questions, problems, comments, or suggestions, please don't hesitate to contact us or send us your feedback.
Tell us what we're doing right, and what we're doing wrong. Tell us what you'd like to see at WheelOYum.com.