Tag: development update

Welcome to the new Spawn Room website! I’ve spent the last few weeks redesigning and recoding everything to make it simpler, more accessible, and purpose driven. Before version 0.3.0 the website was designed to handle a wide variety of different features and ideas, but I realized it was too confusing. I had trouble explaining to people exactly what we did here.

So after sitting down and thinking about it, I decided to attack this project at a new angle. Rather than merging all my ideas into one site, I want to create an eSports Network that handles multiple websites under one user account. If you’re familiar with the Stack Exchange (with sites like Stack Overflow), you’ll be familiar with what I’m doing here.

This website specifically will focus on eSports data. The front page is now a search engine for finding players, teams, events, etc. Within these pages we track various stats, allow users to rate and comment, and if you own the page or earn the priviledges, can help submit and modify data. Think of this as the IMDB for eSports!

As with all updates on The Spawn Room, it is important to remember that bugs may exist. Since I code this project alone, I can only discover so much on my own. If anything looks or acts broken, it probably is. Please notify me via email, Facebook, or Twitter and I’ll take a look. If something looks funny, this is probably the CSS acting weird. You can usually solve those issues simply by refreshing the page (F5 on your keyboard). Again, if that doesn’t fix it, or breaks it even worse, shoot me a message.

Finally, I wanted to mention that some features, that existed in the previous versions, have been removed either temporarily or permanently. I will be analyzing each of them over the next few weeks to determine if they belong on this site or somewhere else. Please be patient as I continue to roll features and fixes out. I’ll try to get everything up to snuff as quickly as possible.

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading and feel free to share any feedback, suggestions, or criticism whenever you can! I’ll be listening. :)

EDIT: I forgot to mention that I’m currently working on SQL optimization to try and get queries running faster. But I’m also limited by my web host so…yeah. Eventually I want to move to dedicated hosting which will greatly increase the sites performance!

Quite a few changes have been rolled out this week as verison 0.2.4 nears completion.

Of these changes, the most important have been the minor visual alterations, the freedom of creativity expansion, and the addition of some new filters. I’ll update the Site Progress page once all the changes have been implemented.

Please check out the “Sample page” which shows how you, the event organizer, player, manager, or whatever, can style a page to advertise your…whatever it is. Wow, there’s probably a better way for me to have said that, but I don’t feel like erasing it.

Anyways, my next development focus will be on more filters and user abilities. Stay tuned!

So yeah, version 0.2.2 turned out to be a little bit bigger than anticipated. The visuals have been altered, the entire backend has been torn apart and then reassembled, and the conceptual model of what we’re doing here has been updated.

One unfortunate result of this update has been the loss of the previous posts, views, comments, and ratings. Actually I shouldn’t say loss since the DB is still intact and will remain backed up, but rather, I wasn’t able or willing to convert all the records. It would have been a huge headache. In the future I might do something with them though.

User accounts have been transfered over though! So logins will still work all fine and dandy.

You’ll also notice this is a “preview” release right now. The reason being that I changed so much that some minor features have been removed, some things might be broken, and there is undoubtedly a handful of bugs lying in wait.

I’ll give an update when everything is rolled out 100%. Until then, thanks for reading and see you around!

The latest update has been applied and with it comes the “pages” feature. This “preview release” offers the ability for registered users to create pages for events, games, matches, players, and teams. The idea behind this feature is to build a Wikipedia-like experience for discovering aspects of the eSports world. The main difference here being that it’s specifically designed for eSports, allowing you to, for example, submit an event, and then connect players, teams, and matches to it.

Right now the feature is slim and contains just the core functionality. But there’s a wide range of additional options I want to apply over the next 0.2.x patches.

The next patch, version 0.2.1 is already planned out and will contain a bunch of little updates and tweaks. One specific fix will (hopefully) address a persistent bug with submitting text fields. Currently, if you paste from Google Documents, it adds extra tags and cuts off posts. I’ve tried fixing this before, but TinyMCE doesn’t appear to be stripping tags properly.

I’m also going to be looking into caching again to increase site performace, various visual and accessibility tweaks, adding edit/delete to comments, more submission forms for shows and the RSS feed, and some other housekeeping updates. Should be a decently large patch.

Until then, please let me know if you discover any bugs! Thanks.

So as the site announcement made clear, version 0.1.6 has been launched as of yesterday! It was a huge change, but mostly behind the scenes. I cleaned up and verified almost every line of code currently written (all 11,000+), and improved security which was definitely needed.

There are also some front-end changes you’ll notice, like on the dashboard and the re-addition of the “news” page. I also added cacheing to the dash so it should load faster. Unfortunately highly dynamic pages like “news” will probably be slow. Our web host is awesome and all, but I think it’s designed for more static websites. In the future I’ll definitely try and move hosting in-house on a dedicated server, but that may be awhile from now.

I should also mention that there may be bugs with this new update. Since I altered a lot of back-end code, there is a good chance something got messed up. I try to test as much as possible, but I can’t spend forever trying ever angle. New feautres won’t code themselves! :P

Finally, version 0.2.0. I am just starting this update right now. It’s going to be another big one that adds the latest feature to the site: pages. Pages are a MediaWiki-IMDB-Last.fm inspired feature that brings eSports information one step closer to TSR users. They will be available for players, teams, events, games, and matches. You will be able to submit them, alter them, rate them, and discuss them. I think they’ll end up being a pretty powerful feature. ETA on this update is…probably like 2-3 weeks depending on how smoothly everything goes. So stay tuned!

2012-03-21 09:59:09

Version 0.1.5 has finally been released! After getting side-tracked with a bunch of “business stuff”, event preparation, and marketing plans, I finally sat down and finalized some stuff for this release.

You can find everything that was changed on the site progress page like usual.

One thing I want to focus on over the next week is performance. I feel like the site is a bit slow and I want to remedy this by double checking what’s been programmed so far and maybe tweaking things here and there. I’m not sure how much will also come down to my host though. Eventually I’d like to migrate everything over to a local machine but that will be awhile from now.

I’m also working on releasing some video content for the YouTube account AND some sweet “POV” articles for the site. So that should be exciting and awesome.

Thanks for reading!

I’ve been adding some minor updates to the site. Within the next few days (maybe Monday), version 0.1.5 will be released! It will be adding some new mini-features that I think will be cool.

The most noticable change should probably be the visuals which are already different. I would like to note that I am NOT a designer. I know code and some very basic design. So that’s why the site looks “old school”. If anyone wants to help out in that field, let me know! :)

Starting next Monday, I will also be starting my “marketing campaign of awesomeness”. Basically this means I will going out and sharing my work with the community, friends, family, and colleagues. The hope being that people begin to take interest, see the value of this site, and perhaps stick around to hang out for a bit. If you’re interested in helping, there are a few simple ways:

1. Follow us on Twitter, Like Us on Facebook, and Subscribe on YouTube. This helps a lot!
2. Let me know what you think. Post here, Tweet, email, whatever you want. Any advice, suggestions, requests, or criticism are welcome!
3. Signup for an account. This is another big one that helps tremendously.
4. Comment or rate an article.
5. Tell your friends. The more people taking a peak here the better.

Any of these points will help, even if you only have time for one. All support is much appreciated and I hope to repay each and every one of you by bringing amazing content to the eSports scene. And perhaps some free giveaways!

As always, thanks for reading. If you want to talk in person, join our Mumble server and find perlox-mobile. I am on everyday.

Ladies and gentlemen, today is an important day. Version 0.1.4 of the site has been launched! It’s a pretty big patch so be prepared for potential bugs. I’ll be working tirelessly to fix them and make tweaks throughout the day.

To summarize the patch, here are some of the core changes: mobile version of the site, “news” page with article filters, forums, many minor aesthetic improvements, Google Custom Search, and minor back-end improvements. You can read more about it on the “Site Progress” page (footer).

I also wanted to mention the “tsr-adblock.txt” link in the footer. This little txt file can be added to your Ad-Block as a custom list. Why would you do this? To support eSports of course! The list contains some of the biggest eSports websites (including this one) and will disable your ad-block on them. That way you can help support eSports by checking out the ads and optionally clicking on them if they interest you. It’s important, so really consider it.

Finally, the forums are a work in progress. I will be working on them today as much as possible. So be sure to check them out a little later on.

Thanks for reading!

I thought I’d give an overall update about what has been going on and what the plan is for the future.

Over the past month I’ve been working on the core release of this site. It launched in early January as version 0.1 and has worked it’s way up to 0.1.2 with 0.1.3 scheduled for this Friday. Version 0.2.0 will be on its way sometime in February.

I’ve also been keeping up with eSports shows which I’ve been adding to the “Looking for the best eSport shows?” page. Check it out if you haven’t, there’s some really good productions going on.

On the social networking side, I’ve kept things pretty quiet since I want to hold off making any big announcements until more of the site is ready. Plus the slow growth is good for testing performance.

The new Spawn Room Mumble server is being hosted on site here at the office and its been running pretty smooth. Thanks to Apoplexy Industries for that one…

And that’s about it for now. More announcements in the future as new features are deployed.