Entries Tagged 'update'

January is wearing on and Blog Friends users may wonder when they can expect to see some of the new features we have promised in previous posts—such as blog badges, a “Blog Friends 100″ leaderboard of top posts, blog stats pages, user profile pages and so on.Well, two things have happened since the New Year that are shaping our plans.

Firstly, having observed our servers come under ever-increasing strain from our steadily growing userbase, we have realised that we need to completely rebuild Blog Friends from the ground up. This will ensure continued reliable service as we grow; it will also enable us to offer Blog Friends access to users and partner services beyond Facebook.

Secondly, ideas from Mike Butcher and Lloyd Davis have inspired us to build a new service that extends Blog Friends’ utility into the physical world. We believe this project represents such an exciting opportunity to improve our users’ lives that it’s worth prioritising over everything else on our to-do list. All we can divulge for now is that the service will involve Twitter and Google Maps, as well as a couple of other popular web services! We hope to have something ready for launch by early February.

Once we have completed this new mystery service, we will be turning our attention to re-architecting Blog Friends as a solid and scaleable platform for all the great features we have mooted in previous posts. At the same time, we will strive to add all possible short-term improvements (for example, factoring post ratings into all your River content) that we can without adding too much additional strain on our poor database server.

Meanwhile, we hope you continue to get plenty of value from the existing Blog Friends service, which appears to be ticking over just fine. Happy Blog Friending!

You can now track your Blog Friends’ activity (and vice versa) from the comfort of your Facebook NewsFeed—as illustrated below:

If you like getting these NewsFeed items, simply click on the “thumb up” icons next to each one and Facebook will keep showing them to you. Also, by letting Facebook know that these items are helpful, you will ensure that more people get to see them, thereby helping us to spread the word about Blog Friends.

Thanks to everyone who completed our survey on new feature ideas (sent to all members of the Blog Friends Group—do join up if you’d like to get involved in shaping Blog Friends’ future). Your feedback has been encouraging and thought provoking—definitely most helpful in putting us on the right track. : )

Many of your favourite ideas are going to take us some time to deliver, but happily there was one—one of the most popular ones, too—which we have been able to add right away. You wanted more prominent links to your original blog posts, and we have now added them:

We hope that these links will encourage even more readers to click through to your blog(s), participate in your posts’ comments, read more of your posts and so on.

The other thing we have added to Blog Friends in this release is a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page and lots of links to it in your River and profile box. This should help users to get answers to problems and questions quickly, while also allowing us to get on with making Blog Friends better rather than writing answers to lots of similar questions on the Group page forum (although we love to talk to you all).

The last feature release we plan before Christmas is an update to the items we send to your Facebook NewsFeed—we are working to bring you more kinds of more useful information. Details on this blog within the next few days.

First off, Luke tells me that I should warn you that technical information lies ahead, so…

WARNING: Technical information lies ahead!

Now, on with the post…

The Internet Explorer bug fix we have just pushed out was the old “Operation Aborted” bug, where using JavaScript to modify the HTML structure whilst it is still being “drawn” causes Internet Explorer to throw a fit, and take you to its standard error page. Normally, this is fixed by putting a simple 55 millisecond pause on executing the code, and placing the code right before the closing tags in the HTML. However, in Facebook canvas pages, this is not so simple, as you cannot position your FBJS before the closing HTML tags. So your delay must be longer. We already had the delay at 500ms, but this still did not appear to be enough, so now it is set to a full 1 second. This seems to cure it for everyone we have talked to, but if it does not cure it for you, please let us know!

The Safari bug, and I was very surprised by this, was much worse, I think. It has to do with comparing variables - you can no longer say “if a is less than b” by writing “if (a<b)”, you must now write “if (a < b)” - note the white-space surrounding the “<”. I call this the “Safari white-space bug,” not to be confused with the “Internet Explorer white-space bug” which we have already had issues with! The FBJS used by Blog Friends has been updated so that all the comparison operators are surrounded by a space on each side; and this appears to have fixed this issue. If you find it has not fixed the issues for you, please do tell us! That is, if you choose to use Safari… Personally, I am a Firefox fan, and we have had, to my knowledge, no Firefox-specific bugs with Blog Friends so far. If you do choose to use Safari 3, perhaps this post may change your mind…

On an unrelated note, I found this post by Chris Garrett on the Firefox plug-in “Read it Later” that I would like to share with you. Like Chris, I open loads of tabs whilst browsing the web, intending to read them when I get a chance. Unfortunately this practice pushes Firefox’s already bloated memory usage through the roof. Having 6GB of RAM in your workstation helps here… but this plug-in alleviates the need to have so many tabs open in the first place! I hope you find it as useful as I have started to.

Happy Blog Friend-ing!

On the whole, the community feedback for the new version of Blog Friends has been fantastic: we’re really flattered that so many of you are passionate enough about our app to contact us and tell us your views. However, whilst much of the feedback has been positive, there’s one area that’s been a real disaster: the profile page

Many of you have got in touch to say you’re unhappy that the profile page of Blog Friends is displaying “strangers” in the “River”. With hindsight, we really should have seen this coming and we agree that the profile box should be about you and your friends/favourites - i.e. not about people you don’t know.

So we’re going to fix this issue very shortly. Hurrah!

Our quick fix is to make it so you only see your friends posts (so long as they have written some!). For most of you this means no more strangers; new users without any Blog Friends will naturally still get mostly people they don’t know.

We’re also looking at improving the profile box in other ways. However, we’d like your thoughts about it before we work it into the app, so there will be a blog post about this shortly where you can post your feedback.

Thanks again to all those people who took the time to voice their thoughts. We’re sorry that some of the changes weren’t great for you, but with your help we can make Blog Friends the best app it can be.

One of our servers is going haywire - many of you will have seen the dreaded facebook kinks error when you go to use the app.

Really sorry for this - we’ll have it fixed shortly.

Edit: very shortly evidently.  Seems like the database server just hacked up a hairball or something.

And now, for an update from a techy’s point of view…

Yesterday, our hosting provider, XCalibre, was still working hard recovering from a major outage, caused by a power spike. It took a little longer than they anticipated, but now all our servers are running fine once more. Unfortunately the Blog Friends v1 Beta test server suffered the longest downtime, but it is now back up and running with the latest Blog Friends code!

The last 4 days have been a frenzy of CSS/FBML/FBJS and PHP coding to polish Blog Friends v1 Beta ready for release on Monday. We are almost there now, with just a few cross browser issues remaining. One of the major issues with writing a Facebook application that heavily utilises the more complicated features of Facebook’s FBML and FBJS is that you cannot, generally, use tried-and-tested solutions to standard browser bugs, such as Internet Explorer’s whitespace and peek-a-boo bugs. For another example from a different browser: don’t try and embed (FB) JS functions in an (FB) Ajax fetched page if you want it to work in Safari - it is not pretty. We do the majority of our development in Firefox due to its excellent debugging extensions, such as Firebug.

Fortunately, the issues with hosting over the last 2 days have not delayed us too much, so we are still on target for a Monday release. All of the major features work in the latest versions of the major browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer 7/6, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, …) all that is left is to fix some cross-browser CSS styling bugs, modify the wording here and there, and give it some major re-testing. I, for one, can’t wait to get v1 Beta released so that I can start really using it in the context of the larger Blog Friends community, rather than just testing it in a closed off development environment!

Due to the major changes in v1 Beta (and massively more advanced functionality compared to the current live version, v0.7) the database has had major structural changes, meaning that we will have to disable Blog Friends on Monday whilst we convert the old database over to the new format and update the code. This process will likely take most of the day, so try and get your Blog Friends fill on Sunday night!

We at i-together apologise in advance for this unavoidable downtime, but we hope that you think the final product is well worth the wait (we certainly do!), and we very much look forward to hearing your feedback on it.

Goodbye, and Happy Blog Friend-ing!