360voice Dev Blog

I'm back, sorta!

My wife and I are home from the hospital with our new addition. In between naps and feedings, I am slowly diving back into my email and forum reading. A special thanks to Steve for tracking down some pretty big server problems while I was out. Hopefully things will run a little smoother.

Things are still up in the air for me with everything, so I will do my best to respond... but don't count on a quick turn around for a few more weeks.

Also, thank you to everyone for the Live PMs and emails/comments of congrats! I didn't have wifi at the hospital so my Treo got a big work out reading them all.

All alone for code night

It was just me for code night tonight and I learned a few things.  First it's lonely coding by yourself, and second two people can get a lot more done then one.  It's been a hectic day, and I have to be back up in 5 hours, so I didn't have a lot of time to code.  With the other errors today and encoding issues I spent a ton of time with e-mails and on the server for support so that ate my time as well.

My first focus was correcting some issues we have been having on the back end with gamerscore distribution, nothing you will notice on the front end but it should solve a major headache for us.  While I was in there I played with some different designs for that data, but nothing as usable and more interesting then what we have now came out.   The tough part we have had is that breaking down into equal groups of gamerscore distribution for each game just makes it really clean to see the distribution comparison over different games, I tried showing it with all the different possible combinations for a game, and it was just too much. 

Second I fixed that nasty bit of code that kept setting Small Arms to a retail title, should stay arcade now!

Last I did some genre changes.

• Added DiRT to Racing.
• Added The Godfather to Sandbox

So not as exciting as last week, but we have some new features our hardcore users should enjoy coming (possibly next week).

So keep the feedback coming and use those forums to let us know what you think! 

Blogs late today

Because I am watching the site myself, and the servers hate me, they decided to not kick off on time today.  So Blogs will be late. [Insert the saddest smilie you can think of] We are also have serious encoding issues with special characters that are causing various problems, if you notice your blog missing ( although you can see it in the archives ) fill out our contact form to let us know.

Thanks for everyones patience!

Congrats ChangeAgent!

Congrats to ChangeAgent (Trapper) who had his second child yesterday, a healthy baby girl.  Everyone wish him and his family the best!

360voice wins 360friendspot community award!

360friendspot has announced the winners of their first annual community awards! 360voice was nominated in the "Best Community Site" category, and with 57% of the vote, we pulled it out! Thanks to everyone who voted!

The cool cats over there put together a rad little video announcing the winners. Go check it out! Steve and I even give a little speech.

Watch the 360friendspot awards video!

Thanks again Squidpunch and Zaam IT for putting on the awards. Good times!

Just call it "Badge tuesday"

Steve and I decided to give the badges some love this weekend. It has been far too long. The badges are a favorite part of this site for us and it hurts us when we can't devote the time we want to massage them into greatness! Greatness I tell ya! So here are the changes this week:

New streak badge, it now goes to 100
When we started the streak badge, we really thought 50 days was long enough... but I guess we were wrong... the volume now goes to 11.

Completion % badges now include arcade titles
This is something we have talked about for a long time. The only reason we didn't include it in the beginning was due to some inconsistencies in our data that we have hopefully worked out. I am sure you will let us know if its not!

New genre badge: Sandbox/Open World
The icon is a circle where your actions determine the game. Initial games include Just Cause, Saints Row, Crackdown, Dead Rising, Spiderman, and Superman to start the genre this week.

Genre Changes
Family - Added Shrek the THiRD
Racing - Added Forza Motorsport 2
FPS - Added Shadowrun

The Happy/Sad has been expanded
Instead of a simple Happy/Sad over the last 30 days, we have added a little more granularity to make it change up a little more. Keep those Xboxes happy!!

Creator Badge
I have added a new manual badge to recognize people creating in-game content for 360voice. This was born from the Forza cars people are creating, but it will apply to any in-game content created with a 360voice theme. So if you take a picture of what you have created and post it to the forum, you can get this badge. It is like the API Samurai badge, but a paintbrush instead of a sword.

So that is it for now... because these are new, they won't update until tomorrow after the blogs run... So look for them then!

Recognizing those that help us!

A while back we added some fields to the registration process. One of those was "Referrer" so that you could put in the name of the person that told you about the site. That data has been collecting for a few months, and it is not deep enough to put a Top Ten Referrers gadget on the homepage. As of posting this, here are your top ten!

1. MooBaloo
2. Gamespotting
3. Major Nelson
4. heartkill
5. tw cypher
6. iceshine
7. HouseMDfan
8. imSuck
9. eD Phoenix
10. Snicks

A special thanks to these people for indirectly or directly telling others about 360voice. We don't advertise anywhere (with money), so the best way for people to find out about us is for you to tell them!

We can't handle the spiders!

I was doing some searches on Google, and it is quite apparent what the impact is if you do not allow search engines to crawl/spider your site. For the last month, we have had the blog pages invisible to search engines... this has resulted in HUGE performance gains.

So last night I reworked the pages to include a SPECIAL version just for search engines... it is very stripped down... content only... served only to user agents of identified spider/crawlers... It has been running today and man I tell ya... the site is STILL bring brought to it's knees. At any one time there are problem half a dozen different spiders chowing on the site. It really makes me laugh how hard these things slam your servers... it is comical actually.

It makes me ask the question, how do other content rich sites handle this stuff? I just can't fathom the sheer bashing that blog hosting sites or other big content rich portals have to handle that isn't even user traffic related.

So for now, I have frozen spiders from hitting the blog pages again... I guess for now we will just have to live with low Google rankings. :)

P.S. I actually hate spiders in real life, so this is extra funny.

Mornin'

Okay well this morning it's a bit of a rocky road for Trapper and I, we tried to get a little performance gain last night in our processing, and it caused some errors this morning.  We are working to get things straight, in the meantime there are a few thousand folks with incorrect blog entries, which will be fixed.  We shouldn't have any errors when we are done.

I'll update when things work themselves out, and try not to break too much in the meantime.

UPDATE 1 - Okay we are back on track, bad data out, good data in.   Things will be a little delayed today, but not too bad.  If you see something wrong let us know.

Clear your cache!

Recently we rolled out some caching on the blog page. This means that the first request to any users blog page creates a cache file... that way any request is served from that static file and NOT the database. This has been responsible for a FREAKIN' MASSIVE performance boost at this site. But, the bad part is that now the new blogs don't appear until ALL of the entries are created. The last thing that happens is that after all entries are created, we blank out the directory so they can all create themselves with the new content.

If you get impatient or you think that maybe your cache file is out of date, I have created the ability to clear the  cache for any blog. If you scroll to the bottom of any blog page, you will see a "reset cache" link. I am not going to post it here because I don't need everyone clearing the same blog cache over and over. :) I know how "clicky" you all get with these things... 

So go to your blog, scroll to the bottom and look. If you ever think your cache is out of date, you can clear it using this button. Also, adding a comment clears the cache so that the new comment total can be generated, so that is an option as well.