Driver Database Updates

As some of the bloggers probably have seen there are some issues with the latest blog posts published on the front page. Some blog posts are disappearing, returning, disappearing and then returning again. I’m using Yahoo Pipes to merge all the different driver blog feeds into one to publish them on the front page at Driver Database and for some reason it decides not to fetch all posts every once in a while. The most probable thing is that that particular feed is not responding quickly enough when Yahoo Pipes updates its feed and it therefor decides to skip them. As the Yahoo Pipes feed is using cached data and only updates when the moon is in the right position and all the stars align it might take a while for new posts to appear and for previously disappeared posts to reappear.

If anyone can point me to a better alternative than Yahoo Pipes I’d be very grateful!

The reasons for the Premier Profiles that were added about six months ago was so that the drivers with one of these profiles would get more exposure on the website than the normal profiles. The second reason was of course to be able to get a few Euros to be able to continue to provide the service of the Driver Database website to all the visitors, drivers, fans, teams, managers and series promoters.

If you look at the little screenshot to the left, a snapshot of today’s Most buzz list, you can see that nine of the twenty drivers are in bold and that they have a Premier Profile. 45% of the most visited driver profiles yesterday were upgraded to Premier Profiles. Not bad considering only 0.06% of the driver profiles at the website are Premier Profiles.

So it does seem to do the trick it was designed for, the drivers who have upgraded to Premier Profiles get more vitits to their pages than the drivers without one.

To see the advantages of the Premier Profiles, have a look here:
Premier Profiles – it’s not just all in the numbers anymore

I’ve now added some tools which enables all members of Level 1 and above (the members who have rights to save directly to the database without having to wait for changes to be approved by administrators) to take charge of keeping complete results coverage up to date for the championships of their choice.

By going to the championship standings page of a championship (or the race results page if it’s a non-championship race) there’s a new link under Member Tools named “Become responsible for complete coverage…”. By clicking that link and the button that appears the member takes charge of that championship.

The member can now go to their Dashboard and will see that this championship has appeared under the Coverage header.

The member can then add results, edit results, add new entries in the championship calendar, edit the calendar etc. Fun times!

There are a few more things planned to streamline things a bit, but at least there’s something to get you going.

The cropping in action

I finally decided to really do something about the situtation for approving (or in somce cases deleting) sent in helmet photos. The helmet photos are sent in in all various shapes and sizes and they need to be 130×116 in size when they appear in the driver’s profile pages.

Up until today there’s been a lot of manual work to update the photos as they have been cropped and resized in an image editor and then been uploaded via FTP once they’ve been resized and renamed. Time consuming.

It would of course be much better if the cropping and saving could be done on-the-fly at the website. I’ve been on the lookout for some Ajax scripts that could do the cropping but haven’t really found any that suits my needs until today. The reason for me not writing one from scratch is because I suck at Javascript and Ajax. I fortunately found the jsCropperUI which does the trick just perfectly! All I had to do was to write a simple PHP back end to handle the actual saving of the file and I was good to go!

I emptied the helmet queue in no-time!

And if your helmet submissions weren’t included it was probable because one of the following reasons:

• The submitted helmet photo didn’t actually include a helmet
• The driver wasn’t wearing the helmet
• The file wasn’t a JPG but a BMP file
• The photo was smaller than 130×116 pixels
• The quality of the photo was just too bad

David Fleming at Grand Prix Shootout has made an incredible exclusive offer to members of Driver Database. If you’re a young racer with potential, then this is the chance for you. If you sign up before midnight on April 25 you’ll get a full entry for just £1,950 (that’s saving £2,000!!) AND you might be the lucky entrant who gets chosen at random to get the place for FREE!

Read more about it here!

I’ve made a few updates today. The most important one is that the level 2 members can now merge duplicate driver profiles. It’s probably a bit buggy as some parts of it is more or less untested. I did however manage to merge profiles twice without any problems. Oh well, time will tell.

I fixed the bug where driver’s homepages were removed when updating their profile data. It was probably the most stupid bug I’ve ever had the pleasure of both adding and removing.

Now the driver’s nicknames/pseudonyms are visible in the search results.

Over and out.

The Premier Profiles are now up and running. You can have a look at Raed Raffii‘s page who’s got a few of the new features going, such as the biography, Q&A, sponsors page, YouTube page and Twitter tweets.

As you can see in “most buzz” and in the “Top 2010 race winners”, the Premier Profile drivers can turn on extra visibility and get their name in bold text on the website.

Perhaps most importantly though is that the Premier Profile drivers have extra super mega top priority when it comes to getting their submitted data (and photos) published.

Also, from now on only the drivers with Premier Profiles will get their press releases published.

There are more things planned for the PP’s, so stay tuned for that.

More reading and how to upgrade a standard profile page:
Premier Profiles

I’m putting the finishing touches on the Premier Profiles today and you might stumble across some new stuff while browsing the site today. The drivers with Premier Profiles will have some more exposure on the front page (and in the side columns on all pages, for that matter) and I just completed the first of the front page features. Nothing fancy, just a random racing related question, with not answers from up to five drivers, from the Q&A pages.

If more than five drivers have answered the specific question then five random drivers will be chosen in the list – in true Driverdb style.

More things to come.

The members of Driver Database with a little bit of extra trust (earned by extremely hard work and dedication) can now approve some more submissions sent in by the “regular” users. They have been able to approve fan messages, new drivers and changes to driver profiles (names, birth dates and such) for a few months now, but from today they can also approve changes that have been made to championships and non-championship races. This should hopefully mean that the queue for these entries should be considerably smaller than if I’m the only one who can approve/decline these.

The hard working members who now can approve/decline these submissions are; Bertil, Urs, Dirk, Erick, Erik, Jari, Otto, Federico and Ross. These guys all play an extremely vital role in what goes on at Driver Database and without them the database would probably be only a fraction of the size it is today.

On another note I removed the bug which prevented the cached results on the driver’s overview page to not be updated when an entry had been deleted.

I’ve compiled a little to-do list on a separate page on this blog. I will keep it updated with new stuff and when tasks have been completed. You are all very welcome to come with suggestions of things to improve, but try to keep it reasonable.

A lot of work, very little spare time and trying to complete the Premier Profiles (which for reasons indicated earlier in this blog is quite important for the future of the web site) has made me fall back on my emailing again. But I will get back to you all as soon as I possibly can.

A few drivers can now try out their premier profile; Michael Bilyy, Cassey Watson and Jono Lester took advantage of my free try out (2 free spots are still remaining, just read the my previous blog post for more info) and they can now try it out by logging into their account and looking at all the new goodies that are now available on their profile page under the “Submit info”-link.

Also, let’s all cheer for Jono as he makes his Porsche Supercup debut this weekend in Bahrain! Good luck!
Edit: It appears that Jono will have to wait for his Supercup debut.

Oh, and here’s the link you’ve all been waiting for:
Things to do in 2010