Archive for November, 2007
Written on November 29th, 2007 by phirate
n general in software development, things go roughly according to this formula:
tight timelines x level of innovation = level of crappy architecture
The basic issue is that the faster you have to build something, the less time you have to “do it properly” and the more inclined you are to take shortcuts. Similarly, the more “innovative” or – in other words – off the edge of the map your application is the less chance you have of picking the right architectural elements to support what it will eventually become.
Thus when the two combine you normally end up with architecture that makes a dogs breakfast sound well organised.
That said, I’m delighted to say it wasn’t what happened with Entrecard. I’d like to say it was all hard work and skill, and to be fair I’m going to take some credit because it’s my blog and I’m vain like that. But the fact is there’s a fair chunk of luck involved as well.
Unfortunately, the natural consequence of this is that we now have a nice solid extensible architecture with no actual chronic outstanding issues. And we have Ideas. So Many Ideas. Now I have a feature-list a million miles long, all of which are awesome and I really really want to have them in Right Now Damnit.
Ah well. there are worse fates than having a bunch of cool stuff to write for an appreciative audience 
Written on November 27th, 2007 by phirate
ok, we have some experimental forums live. I know I know I reinvented this wheel and it’s somewhat octagonal and has no suspension, however it does integrate well with our main application and we have plans to integrate other aspects further as well.
It’s not really central to the business plan but at the very least we needed somewhere we could get users to engage with each other – the feedback system has been really good but that’s very much a 1-to-us thing.
We also have a modified dashboard, including a “buzz” slot where we can push some 1-liner announcements, and I’ve removed a lot of the stats stuff and put more explanation in on some things. The main reasoning behind the buzz slot is that we’re changing things so rapidly that we really need a good way of keeping people in the loop.
The removal of the stats was..well, that’s just more appropriate for the statistics section anyway, it was taking up space. I’m not so sure about taking away the balance (it’s on every page in the top right anyway), but I couldn’t figure out a good way of keeping it in play without it looking out of place, so I took the hint. We can always put it back somewhere
Go play on the forum!
Written on November 27th, 2007 by phirate
In response to feedback and our own concerns, the daily drop limit has been raised to 300. Nobody has hit this yet so we’re confident it should be ok. Further feedback welcome.
Written on November 26th, 2007 by phirate
After a bit of discussion, I convinced Graham that we needed to put in a daily drop limit. This went in today, you cannot drop more than 50 times in one day.
The reasoning is that the traffic that we’re generating, we’d like to be “quality” traffic. That is, there’s a decent chance that they’re willing to read a bit of your site and see if it’s something they’d like. This doesn’t happen if people are busy rushing from blog to blog in a desperate attempt to get credits, so while we want to reward people for breaking out of their normal routine and going and having a look around, we don’t want to particularly reward the “rushers”.
We understand, however, that card dropping is *fun*. So we picked a number (50) that seemed reasonable after looking at the average number of drops people did. We’re open to changing this, and there’s also the option of allowing the drop but simply not giving a credit for it. Leave a comment or enter feedback on your dashboard if you have preferences.
Written on November 26th, 2007 by phirate
Lets be honest, while I’m sure all of our users are impeccably honest and would never do anything as sneaky as trying to use a script to do the drops for them, it’s important that these, and other areas, are properly secured.
Unfortunately, I can’t really discuss the measures we use to protect the integrity of the drop system – while security through obscurity is hardly ideal, the principle of defense in depth holds. The idea basically being that you maintain a number of secure layers, information control being one of them, in order to prevent any single flaw from resulting in a complete breach.
I can say, however, that today someone decided to test that out. Needless to say I wouldn’t be smiling about it if I hadn’t already anticipated the attempt and had countermeasures installed. Suffice to say I’m pretty pleased with how it all worked out
Written on November 25th, 2007 by phirate
We haven’t been tracking what I (probably incorrectly) term “organic clicks”, that is, clicks that go from our details page to your blog as opposed to from the widgets. It wasn’t an oversight so much as simply not a priority since most people who really care have analytics or something which tells them how much comes from Entrecard anyway.
However it has reached the point where the information is fundamentally interesting for us, and for those users who are using the Entrecard provided statistics as a measure of how valuable the system is.
As a result, we’re now tracking organic clicks from the details page via a redirector. It should make no visible difference to anything, it’s simply useful. once we have a few days history in the database we’ll add a chart onto the statistics page with the details.
Written on November 25th, 2007 by phirate
For those wondering where the economy is standing right now, basically its..on fire.
As at this posting, the total earned is 35,510 credits roughly. I say roughly because it’s tearing upwards so fast the number changes every time I reload the page.
Of those, 12,317 is currently sitting in accounts, 10,243 credits have been invested in adverts currently running or queued, and the remaining 12,950 credits have been removed from the system via tax on adverts that have already run.
Active users who have spent any credits at all spent an average of 59% of their total earnings, which is much better than it was prior to the price double-up.
There is currently 1,120 days (26,880 hours) of advertising queued on 199..err..201..shit..202 widget-displaying blogs, an average of 5.6 days per blog.
We have recorded an epic 13,620 card drops in total. Seriously, people seem to find it rather addictive. I’m a little worried for some of you.
I’ve had 26 credits removed from my personal account by the bug bounty program 
We’ve had a total of 3,359 advert requests, 444 of which were rejected.
That’s all I can think of right now, gotta go grab dinner. leave a comment or feedback if you’d like any other specific info (that doesn’t invade privacy obviously).
Written on November 25th, 2007 by phirate
Some people are just too popular it turns out that, unlike me, some people are getting piles of advert request emails and it’s just filling up their email box and making them sad.
I don’t like having sad users, so I whipped up a couple of email settings checkboxes that should let you switch off email notifications for adverts or rejections. it’s shiny new so let me know if you have any problems with it, but it should help those people who are struggling under a large enough email load as it is without us adding to it.
You can get to it off the dashboard.
Written on November 24th, 2007 by phirate
You have no idea how angry I am right now. My anger towards Microsoft and IE7 is a towering inferno of geek fury. I can barely restrain my urge to unleash a rant.
I am going to go play computer games until I calm down.
Long story short, I believe I have resolved the issue that prevented IE7 users from being able to drop on widgets. It came at the expense of one area of particularly cool traffic offloading that we had, and at the expense of my sanity. What was left of it.
The essence of the problem was identified by Wavumi earlier. Basically, Internet Explorer went off on this one-browser missing to “make the world safer” by refusing “third party cookies” (that is, cookies being delivered in an iframe, which is how we make the widget work). Except, of course, that doubleclick etc needed 3rd party cookies in order to work, so bowing to commercial pressure they decided to allow them if the website includes a machine-readable privacy policy, called P3P.
Now, at this point everything basically sinks into the sea. You see, the number of people who want to do 3rd party cookie stuff in order to put their forum in an iframe or whatever, is N. The number of people who can be bothered reading the P3P spec is N/100, and the number of people who can fight their way throught he commercial smackfest that is P3P generators, make any kind of reasonable judgement about all the vague terminology in the spec, and actually implement a rational, intelligent P3P file is N/10000.
That means, 9999 out of every 10000 sites with P3P settings have complete crap in them, rendering the entire exercise worthless. However, I have this retarded perfectionist gene which make me wade through all that stuff to Do It Properly.
Only to discover that IE7 *doesn’t care* that I did all that work, because the only part of the whole thing it’ll read, is the “compact” form, and the only place it’ll read it is in the HTTP headers, which means the really spectacularly geeky-cool trick I played with javascript redirectors in order to set cookies on the amazon s3 service is completely useless for IE7 users.
So in the end I had to rip all of that stuff out so that we could serve the “button” iframe from our primary server instead, just so we could set an HTTP header, just so Microsoft could pat themselves on the back for protecting “the users” from..nothing at all.
Anyway, in the final analysis it shouldn’t change things much. Our ability to handle future traffic has probably just dropped from millions of blogs to hundreds of thousands or something like that but you won’t see me losing sleep over it any time soon, and it won’t slow any user sites down since the latency (if there’s any) is contained within the drop button frame and thus won’t delay the page load at all.
Oh the pain. Time to go play some more supreme commander.
Written on November 23rd, 2007 by phirate
