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:
Next week:
I spent the last week:
Next week:
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.
Next week: a redesign of the channel details page and a Data API.
On Wednesday, I spent the day finishing up the Landing page. It didn’t end up quite like Dean and I wanted due to some issues with the video, but I think it’s still good for the new users to get an introduction to Miro.
Thursday and Friday were spent working on the new featured channel queue. It’s not live yet, but it should make the featured channel section more useful for everyone. Now when a super-moderator features a channel, it goes into a queue. The featured section on the front page is updated once per day, pulling a channel from the queue round-robin style so that everyone gets a chance to see their channel on the front page.
This week I’ve been working on making the Guide faster in preparation for the eventual 1.0 release of Miro. The database has been getting more and more use and so I’m trying to add more caching to keep the guide going fast.
That’s what I’ll be working on for the rest of this week, along with some visual tweaks. If I’ve got time, I’ll be working on #9161, adding a category for Adult and a category for Sexuality channels.
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)
This week, I’ll be working on: