Another web push this past week. Stuff was altered, little of it should be noticable.

A few clan searches, some bad colorization. Mostly the takeover skins you've been seeing.

I've been super busy on a new feature that many of the few people who read this blog know about [or have guessed]. I'll be glad when its done.

CK checked in a new skin for an image that many people have been requesting. Offspring doesn't want to thank him in person for it. I are amused at this. Lesse.... yeah, that's all I got. Things should be far far more interesting in a few weeks, maybe a month.

And I dare the lot of the few RSS feeders to bother commenting. DARE!

Monday's web push saw the release of my recent big project. Going through the entire site and making sure everything would work with the new look and feel took a long long time. It would have easily taken 3x longer if we were still using the old phpnuke and phpbb stuff that the forums use.
Which brings up the forums, and their ugly state. Let me just start this by saying I hate the forums. In the short term, I hope to rework the hacks I put in to colorize most of the forums, and get it working better. It was a rush job with them, made worse by some vacation I had previously planned. [Side note: PAX === awesome] With that done for now, I can go back to a communication feature that's been on my plate for far far too long. Which will be interrupted fairly shortly here by an activity report that will be really really cool.

In other areas of the web stuff, the screenshots got some very nice icons, the gamestats have some various improvements and bug fixes, and clan searches had some improvements too. I'd describe them in more detail, but I was far too lost in CSS to realize what others were working on.

Thats it for now, 'nother post late next week.
All we wanna do...

So yeah. Those allusions to having secret codings that weren't visible to you yet? Still true. I have managed to complete absolutely nothing that is visible in today's web push.

Nothing.

I'm almost proud of that. I probably would be if I didn't want to punch something for the frustration various CSS problems.

But soon, my project shall be unveiled and everyone will fall victim to my diabolical plans! I'll show them all! MUAA HA HA HA HA HAAAAA! *cough* *hack*
Stupid mad scientist disease.

Anyways, the blog system has a few changes for you to see. There are some navigation improvements on the left side, and a new blogs overview page that will let everyone see the newest blogs that anyone enters.

Clan searching has been reimplemented again. And this time we really mean it! Again!

Gamestats have a new system for graphs, and its pretty neat in my opinion.

Those are the highlights from what I recall changing. I go home now. Or continue working, one or the other...

I can has bugs, but I not has bugs that people will notice.

Rather, I optimized a few minor things that will start seeing a lot more use. It'll even make these last few words visible to a lot more people. But maybe not these words here, the cutoff has moved to this area somewhere.
I think.
Meh.

On a related note, any blog-related errors that pop up should be contextual as to what went boom. Not that you should be seeing many of these in the first place, mind you.

And finally, after much bug-making and bug-fixing, the profile editing process has been upgraded. Thanks go to our intern for getting avatar-uploading working at this point.

As for me, back to roadmapping the next fun disaster, so I hopefully am better prepared than the last time I started a big new web feature. Maybe I can get around to changing the underlying blocks properly this time.

Or rather, its the day after a web push as I type this now.

Anyways, while there were plenty of various bugs being squashed, there is practically nothing I did that is visible to the lot of you quite yet. I did change the wow miniprofiles to not have empty brackets if you didn't have a guild for that character.

However, other people also put a bunch of work into this release:
miniprofile handling was improved
the wowstats page got some UI tweaks
Fixed a silly bug with the Send Invitations page
links to preferences
gammasts fixed a problem that godjonez told me about over a half year ago

Hrmmm, the bug list is far longer than that, but I guess that's what it really boils down to for you all.

Hrmmm, I seem to have forgotten to update this for a web push or two. Oh well. Of the two people I expect actually watch this space, one I haven't talked to in a while and the other is visiting the office rather soon. I wonder if the second person ever saw that I got the blog views+replies that were requested.

My bet is that I won't hear from anyone on that for a while, but I could possibly be proven wrong. >

My two big changes in today's release are the paginating navigation on blogs and the new feature in miniprofiles. I also got some language bugs in the blog system fixed, including '1 views' on the profile page. In the process, discovered a very annoying discrepancy between firefox and IE. I'll let you guess which side I favor.

Added some redirects for busdev, patched the FAQ links I broke [stupid copy/paste mistake], and upgraded some broken external links on the countries page.

Outside of my narrow view of changes... there have been quite a few improvements on screenshots overall, lots of bugs fixed too.

We had a clan search function posted, but it turned out not to be optimized very well at all. So after trying to fix it and trying to fix it again, it's being worked on internally and the directory has been put back up there. I'm none too happy with having to tease everyone, and also not having the directory _and_ search unavailable for so long. Ahh well. In the end, it will be better working for mostly everyone.

And now for something completely non-work related.
Currently listening to: Our Farewell - Within Temptation

Or perhaps something completely different.

The redirects for blogs are being pushed off, sadly, as I'm not able to do everything myself. And here I thought it was going to be an easy bug.

Fixed a really really obscure bug with nicknames, which I'm somewhat surprised hadn't been commented on before. Also points out how extremely long minor bugs can go unnoticed. This particular one predates me by some long time.

And currently I'm trying to comprehend the potential pitfalls for RSS namespaces and doing custom stuff. A few certain XFP peeps will be happy to hear that. I wonder if they both read this...

Yeah, that was a fun one to set up. I'm still scrubbing my eyeballs. However, it did give me a good idea for next year.

Some new things have been pushed to production for y'all. There are a few more clan activities that are now logged. Its only adding and removing games, plus a line for who switched who's rank. Sadly, the logging of those three things starts from now on, and past history is lost. No, don't bother requesting it.
Also got some better error messages when users are futzing with the blogs, though that shouldn't happen under normal usage.

I've lots a lot of time to training the past couple of weeks, and have nothing to show for it directly. However, the newbie [as I shall refer to said individual for now] fixed a very minor CSS bug, added some improvements to the blog module on your profile page, fixed some internal tools, and asked a lot of questions. My brain hurts.

Screenshot display has gone through a major overhaul. The inclusion of a new wowstats page should also be noted. I didn't get the chance to work on either, though.

And now, I must go add the activity logging to my internal tool and try to add more clan activity things.

And from a quick glance my stuff checks out good.

When looking at the default view of a blog, the newest entry has its view counter go up. We did this because there wasn't much reason to actually view the entry on its own unless it was really long and/or had comments. Which meant that a lot of blogs looked to be reader-less, when in fact they weren't.

I got some CSS cleaned up, as well as some incorrect verbage in blog controls too.

The problem that a certain Romeo brought to my attention has been slightly solved. When looking at blogs you should see the poster's nickname + username as a link. If they don't have a nickname, only their username should show up.

Lastly, I need to check another page to make sure it is working better now.

I am beginning to wonder if there are some more enhancements that I should add to blogs.

Like, having the default view show the [user|nick]name of the last person who posted. I had to artificially inflate my view count to see who it was who posted.