Favorite5 Blog
Our New Home
Hopefully, this didn't cause you too much disruption, but Favorite5 has a new home. Important leson for the rails curious: Don't deploy on Apache. Apache and rails do not in any serious way get along. We are now on a setup running LightTPD + FastCGI. Stability is nearly rock solid, and we couldn't be more thrilled. And if you're looking for a responsive host, we've been impressed with AVLUX thus far. As for what we're up to, we've been trying to dream up some marketing ideas to get the site out there more, without blowing up. (Oh please, let us not be dugg just yet...). If you've got ideas of your own, we're all ears. Use the contact form to let us know.
Posted By Andre on Mon Mar 13 13:21 EST
Two New Features: Auto Error Reports and Favorite Listings
Two new features this evening, one especially cool for you and one especially cool for me. :-)
For you, we've done some prettification on the pages for individual books, albums, and movies. Furthermore, there's a new section toward the bottom, listing the first five users who have a given item as one of their favorites. If there are more than five, you can click a "more" link, which will pull down the whole list.
For me, a nice feature when problems strike. I laid down some money for a cool new book about the technology on which Favorite5 rests, and I've now set it up so that, if something goes wrong, I automatically get an email. You'll know something is wrong when you get either a ton of nasty, programmery looking text, or if you arrive at a page that says "Application Error". Any time you get these evil messages, our system will kindly send me a detailed description of what went wrong, so you don't have to.
IMPORTANT CAVEAT: If something doesn't work properly, you should still contact me. So if you add something to your shopping cart, and everything looks wrong on one of your pages, that's still something I need told about. This new feature only applies to Application Error pages.
You may now return to the Super Bowl, or failing that, the various movie marathons on the other networks.
Posted By Andre on Sat Feb 4 21:27 EST
New Feature: Wider Net Recommendations
I've just loaded a new feature in recommendations. When we find you recommendations, we use your favorites, and the favorites of everyone else on the system. Items in your library are ignored. If you get no recommendations, however, we now expand our net to include your entire library. Hopefully, this will get more of you more recommendations.
Posted By Andre on Fri Jan 27 20:44 EST
The Snappy Has Arrived. And: Finding Each Other.
In case you haven't noticed, the snappy performance has been live for a few days. I got a message from our host that some other residents of our server were eating resources like crazy. They have been kicked over to different servers. Hopefully, this will improve stability.
Additionally, we're starting to add new features for finding other users. On your home page, you'll find a new search box that will look for other users. We're also considering an rss feed of new users, a kind of digital welcome wagon.
A final note. Your public profile can be viewed without being logged in. So if you wanted to, say, link to your favorites from your blog or personal web page, you can make a link quite easily. It would be http://www.favorite5.com/user/[your login goes here]. By login, we mean the username you use when you login. My page, for instance, is www.favorite5.com/user/andre. And if you're really in the mood, we're working on a nifty little badge you can add to your site with said link pre cooked and everything. As usual, stay tuned.
Posted By Andre on Thu Jan 26 14:39 EST
Down Time
We had some down time this evening that I discovered at about 10 EST. I believe the software that makes the site suddenly fast is making it unstable to boot. I'll see what we can do about that. Stay tuned. And if the site ever goes down, send an email to emergency@favorite5.com. I'll try to fix it as fast as I can. I'm also investigating a longer term solution.
Posted By Andre on Wed Jan 25 22:07 EST
Feature Update
You should now be able to delete archived messages, and I've spent a lot of time optimizing database access, which should speed up the site. My next act is to let you mark items in your recommendations such that they won't get recommended any more. If you just don't like Hot Shots Part Deux, well, we'll let you block it. As for the snappy, we're making good progress, and hope to switch over soon.
Posted By Andre on Sat Jan 21 19:14 EST
Coming Soon: The Snappy
We are currently working with our host to implement a modified implementation scheme called SCGI. We have it running on an alternate site, and believe me, it *screams*. But we're having some trouble with some odd quirks that cause the site to blow up. Once we have that working, we'll flip it over to the main site, and you should notice extreme performance increases. Pages should start loading almost instantly. Stay Tuned.
Posted By Andre on Thu Jan 19 15:37 EST
New feature: Organized Recommendations
A few days ago, I segmented the favorites section by media type, so that books, music, and movies each had their own page, namely to stop the insanity, namely yours. Too much stuff on a page is insanity.
In that vein, I've reworked recommendations in the same way, and for the same reasons, though in this case, the sanity check is for both of us. For you, because again, too much stuff at once is bad, and for me because, well, the numbers scare me. I was talking to my brother recently, and he used the phrase "Catastrophic Success." What makes me worry?
Well, let's say this site attracts 10,000 users, and you are one of them. Let's say that of those 10,000, 100 have an item on your book list. Let's also say that they all have five favorites picked, and it's always one item that matches. 100 people times four items equals four hundred recommendations. Obviously, we're not going to show 400 recommendations one a single page. So we must break those recommendations into pages. Rails has facilities for doing this, but doing so will be a whole lot easier on a page with only books or only movies.
The new format also means we could theoretically add new media types for listing, such as video games. Not that we will, but we can.
We're going to be focussing a lot of energy over the next few days on making recommendations easier to manage. As always, let us know if something breaks or doesn't seem to work.
Posted By Andre on Mon Jan 16 14:22 EST
Excuses, Excuses ...
I have to say, I haven't worked on a collaboration like this before, and keeping up with all the minute design changes specifed by database restructurings and general common sense has proven challenging. The master CSS stylesheet is over a thousand lines long, and separate stylesheets serve IE users and the Shopping List page.
There are some problem areas outstanding: The "My Favorite 5" logo needs to be recreated as a Pixy rollover, color matching in IE isn't exact and there are some unstyled areas ("X is already a buddy.", "X Recommends") that need to be cleaned up. Various link hover states need to be clarified. Firefox 1.0.7 displays the infamous a:hover text-decoration error on the image-replaced nav links.
So I'm working on it, guys. Help me out by reporting errors via the contact form.
Posted By Kate on Thu Jan 12 09:46 EST
New Feature: Favorite Filtering
I was wafting through my personal library/favorites, and noticed that the list was getting long, long, long. I had toyed with a page just for books, and a page just for music, etc. It now struck me as an absolute necessicity.
I quickly hobbled together a navigation bar to run the filters, and got some basic functionality. The favorites page is, however, morbidly laced with fancy-schmancy AJAXy magic. So I had to make all the lines of progress play nice. Suffice to say, there was trouble on all sides. Eventually, I decided a session value was the way to go, and after about another fifteen minutes of wrangling, this baby works. It took about four hours, all told.
It's amazing the amount of work it takes to achieve what for the user is a minor adjustment. I can't even count the number of times a client at my day job has requested a "minor change" and I've rolled my eyes, because I know what a bear that little tweak wil be. It's similar to Andre's Inverse Law of Change Requests: The shorter the change description, the longer the work, and vice versa.
So anyway, long story short, you can now limit your favorites to one section if you want. Enjoy.
Posted By Andre on Sat Jan 7 03:00 EST
