At 10 minutes to midnight last night, we tied up the last loose end with the RealRank code. As I write this the team are busily pushing the changes and ranking scripts into Quality Assurance, and generally doing what they do before deployment.

It feels a little like being at NASA. Everyone has an assigned task, everyone knows what they need to do and it's at this point in the project where everyone starts pulling their own respective pieces of the puzzle together ready for a successful launch.

Assuming we don't find any bugs, we will be going live later this afternoon. For you guys, it will almost be a non-event. We'll update the ITK (PPP Tools) script and all of you using it will automatically get the new script. You shouldn't notice a thing. The ranking engine itself will sit idle until 10 minutes past midnight when it will spring into life and bring together all the data the ITK scripts on your blogs have gathered. It takes about an hour to run, after which the RealRank numbers will get pushed back into PayPerPost.com.

If you don't already have the ITK installed (I have to keep stressing, this is just the new name for PPP Tools) then I urge you to go and get it installed immediately. We will make an announcement on the blog when we are live, and it will benefit you to be ready for that announcement. Some platforms though don't support running Javascript in a blog template. MySpace and Vox are two prime examples of this. We don't have a workaround for those platforms I'm afraid, and to be frank if you're serious about running your own blogging business, you really need to be on your own dedicated domain. We could deploy tracking pixels for the non Javascript compliant peeps out there, but ultimately that's a flawed solution; it's far too easy to game that just by using a bot to go and repeatedly hit a page, faking it's IP address etc. The Javascript solution, and back-end, that we have has some very impressive technology in place to reduce the impact of cheats.

So, the first time you'll see a RealRank will actually be in the early hours of tomorrow morning. Thanksgiving day, after the system has been able to gather a true 24 hour period of data, you'll see that number change to be a far more accurate representation than you'll probably see tomorrow.

At this point I do want to call out the people on the dev team that have made this happen. We turned the entire team around on a dime to respond to Google's (in my opinion) anti-competitive machinations, and everyone responded with the eagerness, excitement and determination that characterizes this whole company. So, here's the credits list (in no particular order)

DANIEL GOODWIN
(ITK and Tracker Database)

JAMIE GILLESPIE
(RealRank's website implementation)

MARTY SMITH
(Graphic design for RealRank site)

DRAY LACEY
(Opportunity Segmentation in PPP.com)

TREVOR GRIFFIN
(User preferences in PPP.com)

ROSS YAEGER
(RealRank math)

PETER WRIGHT
(RealRank math and ranking system)

MARK MEALMAN
(Server black magic)

STEVE WOLITZKY
(Quality Assurance)

TED MURPHY
(Vision, design, drive, and loud whoops)

Posted by Peter Wright at 10:33 AM | Comments (22) | TrackBack (0)