small updates

We've made a few small changes in the past few days. Some of them are invisible to most users, backend changes. A few of them are stylistic changes that we feel are steps in the transition to a prettier bookmarking tool.

First, we cleaned up our bookmarks lists a little bit:

As you can see, we added some space between bookmarks, floated the info and edit/save links to the right, and replaced the single-color english links with colorful icon-based links.

• Green links with pencil icons have already been saved by you: click the pencil to edit the link.
• Click a heart to add the link. 
• Click the pencil to add or view comments.

We also simplified our add bookmark dialogue (and fixed a unicode bug):

The top action bar, search bar, and lower action links have been removed. And a cancel link has been added. Much less cluttered than before.

We've got plenty of other updates in queue. But, we're certainly not opposed to taking a detour if you find any bugs or have any great suggestions. And if you like what we've done so far, we'd like to hear about it!

thepointless.com: beginning facebook integration

I've been taking time recently to work on thepointless.com. Frankly, it generates significantly more traffic than Svidgen currently does, and I'd like both reward and harvest those visitors, rather than let the flow of people slowly die off as I have in the past.

On a content level, I've removed a lot of fluff and pushed article-type content out to the angry stickman blog. The site has been trimmed down to a few outbound links and two activities: the clickometer and the dots. Both of these have generated a good deal of traffic in the past and have been featured on other sites, including some youtube videos.

I've also started some facebook integration. So far, this has involved three things:

1. (re)Creating a facebook page
   This was pretty easy to do. The site is pointless, so the facebook page could be equally pointless. The primary obstacle, which is still an issue, is getting facebook to properly auto-update notes based on the RSS feed of the angry stickman blog.
   
   In general though, I find this to have been a good investment. The page allows me to instantly remind previous "likers" that the site is still there, and it's still awesomely pointless. Furthermore, because it's social, interactions with the facebook page serve as a free advertisement directly in friends' news feeds.
   
2. Adding a Like button to the site
   This was pretty easy to do. It's set to share the count with the corresponding facebook page. It's easy for someone to click if they like what they see. And that subscribes them to future status updates from the site. Good stuff.
   
3. and Basic "score" publishing
   The clickometer and dots provide "scores" after the initial interaction. Using the simple JavaScript FB API, these scores can be easily published to a user's FB news feed. And a few folks publish their scores every day, which occasionally leads to an increase in traffic, and more importantly, a really awesome news feed item.

From a marketing perspective, the ROI for reworking the site and starting some basic FB integration has already been great. I'm seeing traffic slowly increase. And I've seeing pages/visit increase drastically. People are engaging more with the site and publishing their interactions, which is turn is drawing more attention.

Since this blog is intended primarily for geeks, I'd be willing to write a little about any of the specifics of the "integration." But, I'm not going to rush on that unless someone voices their interest. The main points are these:

• thepointless.com has been remade and has my active attention.
• facebook integration, even on a basic level, is really beneficial.

In any case, keep your eye on thepointless.com for more updates. I'm thinking of recreating the monkey war next, with facebook integration -- but who knows? It's thepointless.com after all, anything could [or couldn't] happen ... 

efficiency concerns

I just wanted to let folks know that I'm aware of some efficiency concerns on Svidgen. Namely, your Heros' Bookmarks list and tag autocompletion for <user x's=""> Bookmarks have the potential to operate very inefficiently. The latter issue deals with the order in which tags are being filtered. And there's actually a two-stage optimization that I'm considering there. I have some ideas for the former issue, but it's less likely to be an issue until the site grows in popularity. You probably haven't even noticed that one.

So, in short, if you're experiencing some particularly high tag autocompletion latency, know that I'm aware of it. And I'll try to have an optimization in place within a week or so.

A brief authentication issue has been resolved

An issue with authentication, which was reported this afternoon, was preventing users from signing in. We can see how preventing users from signing in might be bad for business. So, we promptly corrected it.

The issue involved a few misplaced lines of code that break the user out of SSL after successful authentication. The code should have been moved to it's new home with a larger segment of code, but it's such a small snippet of code that it was simply overlooked.

For those interested geeks:

if ($signin_event == true) {
    make_secure(false);
}


After successful authentication, the $signin_event flag is set to true. After the core signin routines are called successfully, the make_secure() method is called with a value of false, returning the user to the "non-secure" version of the site. For the production version of the site, this means redirecting the user from an https URL to an http URL.

However, the redirect() method used in this make_secure() method outputs the HTTP Location header with some informational HTML and then terminates the script. And this was occurring before the session cookies were being sent — not a problem for the staging version of the site, which requires no redirection when make_secure(false) is called. For the production site, however, this was preventing the cookie headers from being sent. (One might say that the $signin_event didn't really happen yet :) )

We failed to detect this, because we already had the session cookies from our previous sessions, and it really didn't seem like a game-changing update. So, for ourselves and anyone else who happens to be human, here are some web development reminders:

• Keep the "subtle" differences between yours staging and production environments in mind. They start to seem trivial after awhile, and they're easy to forget. But, minute differences can be crippling.
• Test authentication, session, and cookie-related updates with a clean cookie cache. This is most important when you're playing with cookies. But, anything that touches "the session" in a unique way should probably be tested from a blank state.
• Always keep in mind which methods terminate the script, blocking other important actions. In the very least, be ready to check your methods if you have any doubts. It can be difficult to debug strange behavior if you've totally forgotten than redirect() terminates execution instead of returning. One might say that redirect() should never terminate execution anyway. I didn't necessarily like implementing it that way, but there's good rationale for it in this case.
• Be careful when you copy and paste! It sounds like a simple and stupid reminder. But, I've been involved in web development for years, and I still forget to fully examine my context when I'm tired, bored, under-caffeinated, or simply doing something tedious.

This is by no means an authoritative, comprehensive list to avoid mishaps. It's what came to mind while I was writing this update. So, there you have it.

If you have any tips you'd like to share for avoiding mishaps like this, feel free to comment.

New Feature: search tailoring!

Since its inception, Svidgen has provided bookmark-improved search results a Google Custom Search Engine (CSE). Well, we've finally enabled a Search Just These Sites feature. You can now slice and dice the public bookmarks on Svidgen in any way choose and search within just those sites.

I'm talking about some pretty vast flexibility here. You can search across some really particular slices of the web.  For instance:

• All sites bookmarked on Svidgen
• Just your bookmarks
• All sites with certain tags, like recipes
• Sites that your heroes tagged with world of warcraft
• Just your humor sites
• Or maybe just one site that you happen to think is awesome

And we're working on making this even more flexible and friendly. But, even in the its current state, you can tailor your searches to work against slices effectively enough to eliminate retail results for cool mist vaporizers when you really just need to know the health benefits of cool mist vaporizers. And you can easily get results solely from your list of scholarly sources when your professor says, Wikipedia is not a valid resource! And you can do great things we haven't even thought of! So, post your ideas!

There's just one problem: we're not really sure what to call this. Today we're thinking search tailoring best describes it. A few days ago we thought that search slicing or slice searching was best. What do you think?

What's the best way of saying, You can search the web how you want to now?