Paul Swartz’s PCF Devblog

This wasn’t a particularly productive week for me. Mostly I was working on the landing page, fixing some small issues and doing a new layout for the channel subscription section. I did a lot of work trying to make the test cases for guide work again, and they’re almost there. I’ve just got a couple hard-to-diagnose bugs. I also added a couple new tests for the newly-approved channel queuing feature. I’ve also made a little progress on the featured queue, but mostly that’s waiting on the test cases passing again so I can add tests for that before I start in.
Today I was working on an extension to the Guide’s error reporting mechanism. Currently, errors are logged to a file which I check periodically, but mostly I’m notified by Dean who’s notified by users. Now those errors are mailed to me, along with a bit of context so that Dean doesn’t have to play messenger.
Next week, I’ll be working on the landing page, a quick redesign of the error page to make it friendlier, the tests, and then the featured channel queue.

Most of what I’ve done this week was for the new landing page. A quick summary: it’s a three-step page: 1) A video introducing the user to Miro 2) A way to get some channels they may enjoy 3) some FAQs. Embedding the video was difficult, but I think I got it working on Windows and Mac. I don’t think it’ll work for GTK, so I’m not trying anymore.
The FAQ section is working perfectly, and I’ll be finishing up with the subscription section this week.

I also got two smaller features onto the Guide. First, there’s a new notification section at the top of pages. This will let us announce things in an unobtrusive way, and also remind users of things they’re supposed to do. Second, there’s a new queuing feature for the new channels. Instead of being dropped onto the front page and new channels pages all at once when moderators approve them, they’re added one per hour. This gives them more time on the front page and therefore more exposure.

This last week was less productive than I would have liked. I’ve been fighting off a cold, for the most part unsuccessfully. However, I have managed to get some work done on the Guide. (Features may not be on https://www.miroguide.com/ yet, but they will be soon)

• Supermoderators can now send e-mails to the owners of featured channels through the guide
• Statistics for channel owners: on the channels by user page, each channel has some simple statistics on how many people have subscribed today/this month and what rank that channel is at.
• Fixed a bug with the rating stars flashing the non-jQuery version, and a bug on Safari where the stars would be all yellow even without a rating

This week, I’ll be working on:

• Queuing for newly approved channels, so that they don’t appear in the guide all at once
• A system for displaying notifications at the top of the page, like the message that are currently there for announcing ratings and reminding users to approve their accounts
• Some small frontend speedups (enabling gzip compression, CSS sprites)
• The big feature: recommendations based on ratings.

We rolled out ratings a while ago, but we recently made a big push for them with a Top Rated page and a blog post. Now I’m throwing my hat in the ring.

Currently, there are about 950 ratings (100 of them are “Not Interested”). I’d like to start working on personalized recommendations, but I’d like to have some more data. A lot more data. I’d like about 2000 ratings so that I’ve got a good range for adding this new feature. If you all could rate some more channels, I’d really appreciate it. Also, you’ll appreciate it when the guide can tell you about new channels you’ll like.

The last week was mostly a bug-fixing week: I think I got through at least 10 bugs on Bugzilla for the Guide. I added the Top Rated channels page, and changed the layout for that and the popular channels page to show the rating.
I did a little bit of caching work, and the site is feeling a lot faster. Last week, the worst page had an average rendering time of 20 seconds. Now, the worst rendering time is 3 seconds, and the average time is 0.6 seconds. I’m still working on it with BDK to make it a little simpler on our end, but not at the expense of the caching being effective.
This week I’ll be working on adding some features: releasing approved channels slowly to avoid overloading the “New Channels” page, the ability to download individual videos from channels, and some simple statistics for channel owners.

This week I worked on fixing some display issues on Firefox and Safari. I also updated the donate bar when we broken $50k. I also finished up a couple scripts which check un-approved users. Old users were grandparented in, but new users have to give a valid e-mail address and confirm it with a code.

The rest of my time has been spent doing caching things. There’s some new code that’ll be going live in the Guide hopefully later tonight which will hopefully make things a little better. Then Ben and I will be discussing what we think the best way to make the guide keep going faster is. I’ve been doing some logging, and I’m getting some good data. Currently the slowest pages overall are the 1st channel submit step, the channel details pages and the subscription-hit pages. The slowest pages to render are the front page, the languages and popular pages, and the channel submit pages. Searching is also slow, but on average it takes about 1 fewer second to render than the popular page.