Sorting by score has been added to all the Thing lists. This should have been there from the beginning really! Thanks to jun6lee for the suggestion. Check out the top movies, for example, to see it in action.
A “games” category has finally been added! Ignore any mis-categorised things for the time being - I’ll fix them tomorrow.
I tentatively pushed a complete update to the @oo5 machinery a few weeks ago. I’ve been quietly keeping an eye on things to check that everything’s working and, much to my surprise, all seems good. This update was mostly for my benefit. @oo5 was my first go at programming in about 7 years and I made a lot of mistakes. Some of the machinery was impossible to maintain or improve and I’d coded myself into a corner.
So I went back and started again.
For the technically minded: the back end is now based on Merb instead of Rails. I absolutely loved the experience of coding on Merb - the documentation is sparse but the API is guessable enough to make up for that.
This release does have a few notable feature improvements too though.
Direct messages are now supported across the board. If you don’t want to annoy your followers with a barrage of reviews you can swap the @oo5 part of your tweet for d oo5. Here’s an example:
d oo5 Che: Part One 3.5 For an ignorant person like myself, educational, engaging, realistic & insipiring to see the revolution beginning.
The design has been tidied up a tiny bit, pushing the movie posters, album covers and gig photos that first showed up on the home page down into the rest of the site.
Lastly, I put a bit of time into standardising the API for getting data out. You can now get RSS, XML and JSON for anything that deals with reviews. Take a look at the examples on the syndication page if you’re interested.
I tentatively pushed a bunch of updates to @oo5 the other day. Most things seem to be working but please bear with me!
Updates to the home page are live: http://tinyurl.com/6om8ra … They’ve been a long time coming!
It’s been an awful long time coming but the home page redesign is finally up! I wanted to get images into the design from the very beginning but I was a bit intimidated by the prospect of having to wrestle an assortment of APIs. The whole process actually turned out to be remarkably easy. At the moment I’m using Last.fm for album covers, MoviePosterDB for film posters and Flickr for everything else.
I’ve also finally taken the time to attempt an explanation of what Out of Five is actually for. I’m still not happy with it but it’s a damned sight better than it was before:
Out of Five is a little service that lets you review the things you’d like to remember or recommend - gigs, movies, restaurants and so on - from the bus home, your sofa or wherever you happen to find yourself at the time.
Most obviously, I’ve rethought the layout for individual reviewed things. I wanted to try and present a summary of the sentiment around each thing and give a little extra help for people wanting to join in. I seem to remember reading somewhere that when Alexander Graham Bell was trying to push the telephone into the mainstream he chose to install his new devices in public places - cafes, restaurants, bars etc. His strategy was to show (likeminded) people how to use phones instead of telling them. @oo5 is hardly rocket science but it’s an odd way to carry out the act of reviewing and I don’t think I’d really put enough thought into helping people along back when I first started the project. Anyway, that’s what the stuff over on the right hand side is: an example review and a ready made tweet for people to copy and paste.
I still need to push some of the changes deeper into the site but for the time being, let me know what you think…
I’ve finally pushed the new version of the home page live so it’s up for all to see.
My relationship with BackgrounDRb has been stormy. I loved how quickly it got me started with grabbing data for @oo5 - I installed the plugin, wrote a couple of workers and added the start script to my deply task. Easy. Except it never quite worked. Every couple of days one or more of my workers would fail. No errors in the logs but nothing firing. Maybe it was something I did but I couldn’t figure out how to debug the problem.
Without BackgrounDRb I would never have got @oo5 up and running but I finally decided it was time to give up and try something else. After loads of reading and a little asking around I decided to go go lo-fi: cron + script/runner.
Step 1 was the rolling of my BackgrounDRB workers into models - dead simple, nothing to write home about.
Step 2 was all about Cron… I’ve never liked Cron very much. I have never been able to remember how the triggers work and I was pretty keen not to have to wrangle yet another set of tricks. Luckily for me a compromise turned up in the shape of Cronedit, a gem to allow the editing of cron jobs from Ruby. My (Vlad) deply.rb now has a nice set of tasks for adding and removing jobs. In case you’re interested, here’s what mine looks like:
remote_task :add_tasks, :roles => :app do
CronEdit::Crontab.Add 'grab_from_twitter', {:minute => "1,3,6,9,12,15,18,21,24,27,30,33,36,39,42,45,48,51,54,57", :command => "#{deploy_to}/script/runner -e production 'Worker.grab_from_twitter'"}
end
Step 3? Profit. The new mechanism has been in place for a couple of weeks and it appears to be working without a hitch. Phew.
I’ve added a couple of little widgets to the Thing pages to make it a bit easier to both review things yourself and correct their categories.
