| OtakuBooty: Making The Simple Complicated |
[Sep. 6th, 2006|07:16 am] |
 When logged into OB, you'll now see a box of newsfeeds on your sidebar. Pretty simple, right?
Performance. First of all, you can't suck down newsfeeds on every pageview. I found a nice piece of ASP code that caches newsfeeds as XML files on the server. This reduces the per-feed, server-side page generation time for each feed from ~1000ms to ~50ms. However, that's still close to 500ms when dealing with nine feeds... it gets rather expensive to load and parse those XML files from disk. So I modified that and added another layer of caching that caches the rendered HTML in RAM. Now the newsfeed box only takes a few ms to generate assuming the cached info is not out of date.
Everybody's Newsfeeds Suck. Everybody's newsfeeds are freaking wacky. ANS's news feeds have huge, ugly timestamps that I had to regexp out. The OB Wiki newsfeeds have lots of dupe entries that I had to strip out. And so forth. Just about every newsfeed there required special handling.
Byte-Counting. The newsfeed box ads about 5KB to every pageview. Previously, we'd averaged around 30KB per pageview and I wasn't too happy about jacking this up by 20%. I went over our markup with a fine-toothed comb. I also improved the theme system to make it use external stylesheets instead of embedded styles. I was able to shave 2-3KB off of every pageview to mostly offset the 5KB incurred by the newsfeed box.
Letting People Hide The Newsfeeds. OB's sidebar is pretty crowded. I had to figure out a way to save space. I borrowed some DHTML code to allow the code to be categorized within a tabbed interface. Then, after a lot of experimentation, I came up with the "undertabs" that allow users to show or hide the newsfeed and member browser boxes altogether. Writing the expand/collapse animation was challenging because I suck at Javascript but it was a fun learning experience and I'm mostly happy with the result.
Crossbrowser Testing and Internet Explorer. God, you're a piece of shit if you use Internet Explorer. What a blight on the Internet that thing is... how many hours and millions of dollars have been wasted by developers working around IE's flaws? Think where the world would be if that effort and money had been spent on useful things. Getting things to work and look okay in Safari, Opera, and Firefox was pretty effortless but of course I had to code in all sorts of alternate stylesheets and codepaths just to make things work in IE.
All in all, this "simple" feature took about a week. I could have thrown together a rudimentary version in half a day (and actually, I did!) but I paid a lot of attention to making things right for the final version. I'm pretty sure the final version doesn't suck. I enjoy using it myself. |
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| Not-Very-Daily Worklog |
[Aug. 23rd, 2006|02:46 am] |
I finally set up a wiki for OB. Right now, only the mods know the URL. We'll let the rest of the members know about it in a day or two once we have things fleshed out a little more. (The mods have really sunk their teeth into the OB Wiki, by the way. Lots of good information and misinformation there already...)
If you've ever used Wikipedia, then you know what a wiki is. Wikis are collaborative websites where anybody can edit and create pages. Finally, we have a place to collect all the obscure humor, inside jokes and other references that are such a part of OB. That psychic ephemera is a big part of OB's "culture" but has always been daunting to new members.
OB should be more accessible to newcomers. Sometimes I forget how confusing OB can seem to new members. The wiki is part of an overall effort to make the community more welcoming - it's a good way to make sure that new members are "in on the joke", rather than simply dumbing things down to the lowest common denominator. There are some usability enhancements on the way as well as documentation efforts like the wiki.
Done:
- Got the wiki up, obviously. Bit of an adventure due to DNS issues and the fact that I've never used a wiki, Linux, or MySQL before... much less installed a wiki on Linux with a MySQL backend. However, it was quite painless aside from the non-Linux-specifc DNS issues. It took me a few hours but now that I know how things are done, I could probably do it again in a half-hour or less.
- Our ad runs on CtrlAltDel and S*P are finished.
- Wrote primer for new OB members
To-Do / Currently Working On:
- Template system that will allow me to send announcements to multiple members via private message. (This is how the primer for new OB members will be sent out) (About 50% done)
- Need to analyze the results from the CtrlAltDel ad runs (and the ongoing Google AdWords campaign) to see what's working and what isn't.
- Finish that darn PayPal payment processing upgrade
- Implement the "micropayment abilities"
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| If You're Interested In This Journal... |
[Aug. 19th, 2006|06:07 am] |
...then it's probably worth it to friend it so that I know I ought to friend you back. About half of the posts have been friends-only so far. Whenever interesting things (financial issues, that incident with the underage poster, etc) are discussed on this journal they'll probably be in friends-only entries.
Then again, "interesting" might not be the right term to use here. Remember my initial disclaimer for this journal:
If OtakuBooty.com was a movie, this journal would be the third option in the "special features" section on the DVD where they interview the lighting guy and the costume designer. In other words, this journal certainly won't be interesting to everybody. In fact, it's mostly for me
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| Semi-Daily Work Log |
[Aug. 17th, 2006|10:28 am] |
Done
- Ads. Ads now running in rotation on AnimeNewsService.com and on CtrlAltDel-Online.
- Added more keywords to AdWords. Trying to figure out which work. You only pay for clicks, so you can try as many keywords as you like. Tweaked version of S*P ad runs tomorrow.
- Updated the online store with new items (XXL shirts and headbands)
To-Do / Currently Working On
- Need to come up with some metrics - ie, how many referral clicks does it take to generate one new OB signup, and how many dollars does the average new signup eventually spend? Need this to figure out the cost effectiveness of various ad campaigns
- Work on that PayPal payment processing upgrade
- Think about how micropayments/item-abilities will work. Need to work on the database stuff and think about some kind of sane user interface.
- Secret Project #2: Information gathering phase
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| Semi-Daily Worklog |
[Aug. 14th, 2006|01:20 pm] |
Done:
- Added a bunch of new Google keywords. So far only like 1,000 impressions and 6 clicks per day. That's a good clickthrough percentage, but not very many impressions. We'll see how the new keywords perform.
- Modified the signup page so that you don't need to click your confirmation email in order to activate your account. Too many accounts were sitting there unactivated because the emails were mistakenly blocked by AOL, Hotmail, and others as spam. How much money did I lose because of that? I don't even want to think about it.
- Purchased ad space on AnimeNewsService. Generally I want to stick to webcomics, but this will be a good experiment. Their webmaster has been really helpful. Ad should go up tomorrow or Wednesday.
Currently:
- Praying the ad currently on S*P works
- Waiting for other webmasters to mail me back regarding ads. It's amazing how like 50% of these guys never answer their emails from me, even though I'm specifically asking them to let me give them money for ads. Hello? Do you not want money? I WANT TO GIVE YOU MONEY. I DO NOT HAVE VERY MUCH, BUT I WOULD STILL LIKE TO GIVE SOME OF IT TO YOU. PLEASE LET ME DO THIS. WHY IS THIS HARD?
Next:
- Work on tweaked version of the S*P ad. The current version blends into their red background too much! The new version will run in our next ad slot, on the 18th.
- Look into image captchas to guard against signup spam, now that we have no activation emails.
- Work on that PayPal payment processing upgrade
- Think about how micropayments/item-abilities will work. Need to work on the database stuff and think about some kind of sane user interface.
PS: I told you guys that this journal might not be the most interesting thing ever. I won't blame anybody for defriending it if it gets too boring for you. (Not that I'd even care if you defriended my regular journal. Hello; they're just journals. Who cares?) |
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| Pseudo-Daily Update |
[Aug. 12th, 2006|10:43 pm] |
What I've Been Working On Lately:
- Making ads. Cheryll made a nice horizontal banner ad for me, which I adapted into a vertical version and animated versions. Took longer than it shoul have because I obsessed over it a bit. Even though it's the most simple ad ever.
- Finding places to put ads. Mostly scouring webcomics to find ones I want to advertise on. I like the idea of advertising on webcomics because I can get a better feel for the audience's personality than with, say, news sites.
- Getting the darn ads online. This takes a surprising amount of work. For most sites it involves a bunch of emailing back and forth with the guy running the site to get their ad rates, availability, etc. Anyway, we now have upcoming ads scheduled to run on SomethingPositive, Anime News Service, and some other sites via Google's AdWords program.
- Customer service. We had an underage user post naked pictures online. Yeah, absolutely not cool at all in several different ways. Needless to say, her pictures were deleted and her account and IP address were banned. This was stressful.
What's Next:
- Updating the online store. Since we have XXL shirts and headbands for sale now. And the buttons are out of stock for now. Until I can pay to get some more made... because I think I'm done with these homemade-ass buttons.
- Watching the progress of the ads. Google Adwords is like a videogame. You have to adjust your keywords and ads based on what's working the best. (Although they do a lot of it for you)
- Upgrading OB's payment system. We need to upgrade to OB's payment processing to PayPal's more advanced system, because the current one kind of sucks. This is a lot of work.
- Designing the OB "superuser" features. Not sure how this will work. These are the "micropayment" features that users can use to upgrade their accounts. Depends on the payment system upgrade.
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| Internets, How Are You? |
[Aug. 12th, 2006|10:02 pm] |
This is a journal about the "behind the scenes" work that goes into OtakuBooty.com, my website. It's going to be a day-to-day worklog that (assuming I keep up with it!) will be updated on something resembling a daily basis.
If OtakuBooty.com was a movie, this journal would be the third option in the "special features" section on the DVD where they interview the lighting guy and the costume designer. In other words, this journal certainly won't be interesting to everybody. In fact, it's mostly for me!
Generally, OB issues will continue to be decided in the mods' forum (whatever it's called this week) and the Site Issues forum on OB. I imagine that discussions may crop up on here from time to time, but that's not this journal's intended purpose. |
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