Code Weekend features: Part 4/4

It is almost 4am... and this installment of Code Weekend is coming to a close. It has been a radical time and man... we have done some amazing things. Here are the last little bits of goodness:

1. Cut over to the three-server architecture is complete!
   And you thought things were running fast before, now almost every request (that I can see in the process monitor is filling in under 1 second. Talk about an improvement! I hope you are all enjoying the speed!
2. Brand new XML Import process
   We now have a super-mega-ultra-auto threading import process that will probably cut TWO HOURS off the daily blog processing. How did we do this? Because Steve is a genius that is how.
   
3. Friendly URLs are here
   To access your blog you no longer have to type .asp files and variable names... simply use the format:
   

   http://www.360voice.com/tag/<your gamertag>

4. Xbox blogs will now mention gamerscore levels
   Your Xbox will now mention when you cross the 100k mark, a 10k mark or a 1k mark in gamerscore... and will make special entries on your first time at 10k and 100k. So that should give you a little something more to look forward to.
5. Added more things to the share page
   The share page for your blog now has more information about the RSS links and the XML web services for your exploring and sharing pleasure.
6. Favs List Edit Screen
   If you have cookies enabled, as you browse the site you get an auto-generated favs list of the blogs you visit. You can now edit that list by clicking the link in the nav menu. Deleting people from the list sets their view count to zero and removes them. This should give you some control over who appears in there and allows you to remove people when their tags change.
7. New support tools for gamertag changes
   Due to the new data structure we suddenly realized that there was no good way to migrate people when they change their tags. That required an emergency code session so that we could get through the back log.

So that is it! This is where we end. Code Weekend II has officially come to a close. Steve heads back to North Carolina tomorrow and we both try to recover our brains before work on Monday. We are both excited about all of the great architecture changes and new features.

There are so many more ideas that we had planned that didn't make it in this round. We ended up having to spend far more time than we imagined on the platform technologies which left little energy to tackle end-user features. Sure, we did get a fair mount in... but the list is still long. If there was a super-feature you were hoping for that didn't appear this weekend, add a comment to this blog post. That will help us prioritize what we continue to work on.

Comments

[Mr Achievement]

Wow Guys... You constantly out-do yourselves... Thanx for all the hard work! It doesn't go unnoticed...

[Mr Achievement]

BTW, I really LOVE the new "Watch List"... Great addition... With the way you guys keep adding content, I might not need ANY other 360 Community Site down the line... If only there was a link in with Leagues, I might never leave...

[Trapper Markelz]

We are trying to do things that make sense for our site and the information that we collect. Even things like Gamercards are something we haven't focused on because so many other sites do it.... same thing with leagues and other functionality. We debated Leaderboards for a long time... but since we had the data, it was no additional work to display it.

Leagues and other things like that which add to the Xbox Live experience are not really the same because they require lots of extended functionality for interaction and maintenance.

That being said, we will be focusing on building out the social-network aspects of the site that allow you to use your blog to discover and connect to other gamers.