Week 1 update
A bunch of bugs have surfaced and been fixed during our first week of live testing, and additionally some new features, tweaks and code refactoring (particularly with the JavaScript) have been implemented.
There were several bugs during the submission process which were resolved yesterday. Most of them had to do with the JavaScript that powers that process, and it underwent a complete overhaul yesterday.
Some URL rewriting has been implemented to make the profile pages more friendly looking, profiles are now /users/{username}, with the sub-pages being /users/{username}/{subpage} and the RSS feeds /users/{username}/{subpage}/rss.
The submission process was updated to include one of those ‘loading’ animated gifs for thumbnails and during the URL validation process. The URL validation process can take a few seconds because while it checks the URL exists it also examines the page to find images and YouTube videos. For the thumbnails this was a bad oversight - they’re generated on the fly until the submission is saved and that can mean the servers are downloading and resizing any number of large images from any number of servers, which so far is showing to take a few seconds.
The widgets shouldn’t let text be selectable as they’re dragged around the screen anymore. There is still a bug with the Activity Spy widget which we haven’t gotten around to fixing yet but it’s on our to-do list.
The way stories are presented underwent a change to further distance us from the look and feel of Digg. We’re playing with a few ideas on how to really add some panache there and to spice it up with some live updating in the background.
We added a “Share” menu to each story so you can easily get the original URL or the discussion page on Sift’d over to the social bookmarking and news services you’re using.
Other minor bugs were found and fixed along the way, submitting stories originally logged a score of 0 when it should have been 1 for instance, I don’t actually recall the others but I know there were a few.
There are a few more areas we’re looking at improving, and a few secret features we’re working out that’ll make Sift’d a valuable asset in your online experience. Searching hasn’t been implemented yet, at the moment it’s not vital and we’re hanging out to see what happens with Google launching hosted site searching.
Overall we’re on track for making Sift’d a great site, and our fledgling community is doing a wonderful job submitting interesting links and building the foundation of a site and an experience we can all enjoy.
