Paul Swartz’s PCF Devblog

In reverse order:
* Fixed a bug in the guide where the overall popularity rank was incorrectly calculated.
* changed the template used for the category/tag/language pages for popular/top-rated channels.
* released a new version of I Heart Miro which should prevent Amazon from thinking we’re buying Google ads and also fixed some cases where URLs incorrectly had our affiliate tag applied to them
* links between the recommendations page and the ‘all ratings’ page
* created a template to display all the channels a user has rated

Lat week, I did a little bit of work with cobranded builds, but that part of my work has been pretty quiet. I also added Firefox 3 support to iHeartMiro and put out the 1.1 release. We finally put out the new moderation interface, and I think it looks really good.

Matt got a new server up for the Guide (PCF5) and I spent Friday getting that set up to take over from PCF4 (the old server). It’s much faster than even PCF4 was, so it should be good for a while.

The rest of my time has been spent with personalized recommendations. It’s coming along well and hopefully you’ll all be able to see it soon.

I’ve spent the last week working on redoing the moderation system in Miro. It’s almost there, so hopefully that will be out by next week. I also spent two days trying to track down a strange bug with the Guide in Miro on OS X. I finally figured out a fix today; I still don’t know what caused it.

Other than some small things with the 1.1.1 release and cobranding, I’ve been spending most of my time with a couple of Guide features. One is the language switcher; the other is a redesign of the editing/moderation parts of the guide. Neither one has outward-facing progress, but I hope to have the editing/moderation stuff done by this time next week.

This week I:

• added a quick Audio flag so that podcast can be added for hosted guides but not show up anywhere else
• finished up the new details page
• started working on a language switcher

Next week:

• continuing with the language switcher
• making cobranded builds using the new 1.1.1 release
• working on personalized recommendations (unlikely I’ll get to this this week)

I’m starting to work on #9505 which allows a user to view the guide in a different language. This probably involves a couple things:

• translating the Guide
• only showing channels in the specified language
• choosing the default language based on what language Miro is in

But I don’t really know what people want from this feature. So I’m opening the floor up to you. What would you like a language switcher to do? How would you like to interact with it? Either add a comment to the bug or to this post, and you can help direct this feature!

I spent the last week:

• fixing some bugs on the Guide
• some documentation work with Dean. We’re working on a simpler document to help cobranding partners make their guides
• RSS Feeds
• started again with the details page redesign, fixing stylistic issues that I’d left when I stopped working on it before

Next week:

• making cobranded builds of Miro once 1.1 is out
• hopefully finishing up the details redesign
• creating a user-visible interface for personalized recommendations

I hacked together a quick feature that I’ve been wanting for a while: RSS feeds for the guide. Right now, there are three of them:

https://www.miroguide.com/feeds/features/
https://www.miroguide.com/feeds/new/
]https://www.miroguide.com/feeds/categories/[category name

Let me know what you think!

Last week, I spent most of my time working with Dean on a redesign of the channel details page. We have some new features in Miro (like the ability to download invididual videos) that aren’t being used by the Guide, so we’re trying to work them in.

I spent some time working on making subscriptions faster. Previously, the subscription-hit page added a row directly into the subscription table, which was getting slow sometimes (1,201,922 subscriptions total). Now, they go into a holding table which is dumped into to main table when the popularity statistics are updated (every 5 minutes). From a quick test, it seems much much faster, and my timing statistics back that up.

Matt moved the Guide over to the new server so that Trac and Videobomb won’t interfere with it, so I did a little bit of work figuring out what that needed, and setting things up once it moved over. It certainly feels much faster.

This week I’ve been doing some more work on making the Guide faster. With the new co-branded versions being released in the near future and an API in the not-as-near future, we think that the Guide could be getting a lot more traffic and so it’ll need to be faster. Right now I’m working on putting a lot of the non-frequently-changed data into memcached.

I’m taking today-Friday off, but then I’ll be finishing up the caching stuff and moving back to the details page redesign.

• Wednesday: fixed some Unicode errors on the search and profile pages. Also, finished up the new caching for the channel details page and the featured queue by adding tests.
• Thursday: Unicode errors on the tags page, and some changes to the landing page
• Friday-Monday: Adult flagging (see this post). Also, some preparation for Miro 1.0: a static page in case the Guide got overloaded.

Next week: a redesign of the channel details page and a Data API.