Driver Database Updates

My son Albin, who’s now one year and four months, has had a feature request. Well, he hasn’t really been aware of the request, but the solution saves him from getting fed up.

Albin likes the Driver Datbase photo gallery as he’s really into looking at race cars (and making sound effects to them). The problem is he thinks it takes too long with loading the gallery, selectiong a photo, then going back to the gallery to select another photo. Patience is not something he’s been blessed with.

So, from now on, there’s a little icon of a die down to the right of every racing photo. One click on that icon takes you to another photo, selected at random.

Perhaps not the most important feature ever added to the website, but it sure is in the top five.

Registered users with +1 status (the members who can save and add new information directly to the database) have one new option under Member tools below the championship or non-championship races standings on pages for the current year. The new tool is to set championship or non-championship races as finished. When a championship is reported as finished the top three drivers will get the “Formula X champion 2010″, “Second in Formula X 2010″, or “Third in Formula X 2010″ added under either the Racing career highlights or Karting career highlights header on the front page of their profile.

It’s of extreme importance that you check any points or results so that they represent the final results before setting something as finished.

Registered users who are in charge of updating one or more series during the season will now not see them on the dashboard once they are set as finished. When having lots and lots of championships under your control the already finished ones were taking up too much space – so now we’re rid of those!

Driver Database has grown considerably this past year, which is great. What’s not so great is that it also basically means the Driver Database server needs considerable updates too. I’ve been contemplating on the way forward and I almost came to a descicion on the path ahead. The idea was to keep the current server (which now does everything) and rent a second and faster one that would only serve as the MySQL server (which is the biggest bottleneck when it comes to speed on the website). This would have the advantage that I only need to migrate the database and not the entire website. I would also stay at the current provider, JTLnet, which I only have good things to say about.

However I’m currently reconsidering this and am thinking about moving into a cloud based hosting setup from City Cloud. It would mean migrating the complete website to a whole new continent, but the benefits will probably be greater. The major benefit of cloud servers is that I would be able to upgrade the servers on the fly, adding memory, CPU cores, disk space etc when it’s needed. If the traffic, for example, is huge one day I can add an extra core, only to remove it the day after when the traffic is back to normal.

I’m going to set up a new server and evaluate it for a while, and then make a decision.

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