Archive: February 2008
Woo Hoo Postie Peoples!
More fixes and enhancements to make you shiny happy people!
We're still plugging away for the big SocialSpark reveal, but we had a few moments to take care of the following issues for you. Some may affect you, some may not, but all of them took time to complete so thank you for your patience!
Fixilations:
1. Charity donations- Bloggers, some of you fine people have been donating your earnings to charity- yay! There was a slight glitch in that those amounts weren't deducted from what was reflected in your accounts. They will be now.
2. Open Opps page- Advertisers, now posts that you've already taken a peek at will no longer be bold. This way, you can easily identify which ones you've already looked at.
Enhancifications:
1. Reviewers- you hardworking people, you! We went ahead and moved the 'decision' button on the review pages, so it will be easier to navigate. Huzzah for efficiency!
Remember if you have any questions, feel free to send them over by clicking on the 'Contact Support' link from the bottom of any page within your account. Thanks!
Nearly everyone on the dev team has an iPhone...it's crazy. Even Mark, our DIE-HARD linux system admin. So what happens when a group of busy devs pull their faces out of their computers and take a break from coding SocialSpark to get some grub?
Hello there IZEA blog readers!
Just a heads up, we'll be closing shop for a quick minute tonight at 10:00pm EST while we perform some system maintenance on the site. Don't worry if you are in the middle of posting on an opp, we will be back up in a jiffy and your reservation will remain intact.
Most of the changes scheduled for this rollout are trivial, but the big one I know all you posties will enjoy is the captcha replacement. That's right, I said we are getting rid of captcha. We're replacing it with logic questions. And the best part is you can actually read the questions that are given! We'll also be adding some links around the site to PayPerPost University so you can have all sorts of useful information at your fingertips.
Here's a summary of all the changes...
Advertiser Stuff:
- We're alphabetizing the segmentation categories so it's easier to find what you are looking for
Blogger Stuff:
- The captcha replacement I mentioned
- New links with PPP University info
Reviewer Stuff:
- We're changing the format of the reviewer tracking reports into a spreadsheet
- We're adding a feature to allow reviewers to reverse your charity donation selection if you change your mind before the payout
- Reviewers will now be able to set an expiration date when locking accounts so they don't have to go in and manually undo any locks
- Locked accounts will now have a history stored on them so we can easily identify mistakenly locked accounts or repeat offenders
Questions, comments, gardening tips? Be sure to send them to us by clicking on the Contact Support link, at the bottom of any page in your account. Thanks!
~P~
It's been gnawing away at you this afternoon hasn't it. You definitely noticed it, but you didn't want to say anything just in case you were the only lucky one out there. It just wouldn't do to draw jealous attention from all the other posties, so you just sat there and enjoyed it, hoping it wasn't some accident that would go away in the near future.
PayPerPost.com is now a heck of a lot faster for everyone. There's a bunch of other people out there that have been thinking the same things you have been thinking today I'm sure. Trevor and Larry have been working tirelessly for the past 2 weeks on a massive rewrite of the segmentation engine to speed the site up and cope with PayPerPost.com's continuing meteoric growth, and today we deployed it.
The end result is, of course, a snappier, happier and all round more pleasant feeling PayPerPost.com than ever before.
Well done guys!
As I pointed out in the earlier post, we were having problems with IE which resulted in IE not sending us the data on Windows based visitors (hence low numbers). In fixing that though we seem to have exposed a really nasty bug in Internet Explorer itself.
Basically the ITK code needs to be placed in the body of the web page on your site for the bug to not rear it's head. We think that's unacceptible and are working out our own solution to Microsoft's problems. In the meantime we're rolling back the ITK code to the earlier version so that the crashes IE users are experiencing go away.
The Alpha Test of IzeaRanks, and tracker engine that feeds it, has gone really well. We’ve had a very high uptake within izearanks.com, and most importantly of all we’ve had some great feedback.
By far the most pressing issue has been with the accuracy of the data that we track and report. Lots of people have said that our numbers are significantly lower than those reported with other analytics tools like Google Analytics and SiteMeter. We’ve worked very hard to identify why this would be the case and come up with solutions. I’m happy to report that the solutions are now live, and you don’t have to do anything at all to update your blog to receive the new script.
First, the previous version of the tools waited for the entire page to load before it started to send us data. However, some of you have blogs that take a while to load. You might have a lot of content for example, or perhaps you have a lot of third party plug ins on your blog, all of which add to the load time. The end result is that visitors to your blog may move on to the next page before the page has finished loading. As a result, the ITK never fires any data to us.
We’ve changed all that. First, we reduced the size of the ITK by 25%. Later today we are also going to compress it, resulting in a reduction of 85% in total from the old version. Second, we changed the code. The new code now fires data in two stages. As soon as the script is loaded, data gets fired at us to record the site visit and page view. Then, when the rest of the page finishes loading the second part fires letting us track activity on your in and outbound links etc. The end result is, of course, more accurate visit recording.
We’ve also got some plans in place to speed up the physical delivery of the Javascript to your readers, but I’ll talk about those in a later blog post.
We also noticed some serious problems with the way Microsoft’s Internet Explorer works with our script. First, Internet Explorer would not recognize the name we gave to the embedded form in your blog. The Javascript creates an embedded form which it populates with the data to fire at the tracker server. Since IE would basically ignore the name we gave the form, the ITK would fail to fire any meaningful data at the server. Obviously this caused the bulk of the low traffic complaints we got, and we’ve fixed how we work with forms in IE now. In addition, we’ve changed the way we batch up the information to send to the server to make it more compatible with blogs that use XHTML instead of plain old HTML. The old way didn’t work too well with XHTML blogs and so, once again, we got lower numbers than we should have.
Finally, on the server we had issues where people with ultra high security settings in their browser caused the ITK to fire blank data at the server. The server, stupidly, didn’t know what to do with the blanks and ignored the entire record. Once again, that meant more low numbers, and it’s been fixed.
I’m still looking at an issue relating to synchronizing blog records between IzeaRanks.com and PayPerPost.com and I’ll be blogging about the work on that when it’s ready to go. For now, I hope you enjoy the changes we’ve made to further improve the ITK and move us a lot closer to getting this thing out of Alpha Test.
Some routine maintenance at the data center has caused a problem with the main PayPerPost.com site. Our two sysadmins are both on site at the data center and are resolving the problem. We expect the site to be back online very shortly.
I apologize for the inconvenience.
Hello there!
Just a heads up, we'll be closing shop for a few minutes tonight to perform some system maintenance at 10:15 PM EST. So, be sure to get all your posts submitted before that, so you don't hit any errors.
We are going to roll out a few bug fixes and one new feature on the reviewer side of the application. The changes include the following:
Fixaroos:
PPPDirect offers will can now be canceled by Advertisers without throwing errors
Excluded domains do not separate when an Opp fails to submit
All emails have our updated suite number
Advertisers can sort their Opps and the sort will include video Opps
System has extended the range of allowable values for credit cards
Enhancement:
Reviewers can now ban a blogger from all the accounts of an Advertiser
This last item is the only new feature that we are rolling out. This feature will allow a reviewer to ban a blogger from multiple Advertiser accounts. Some of our Advertisers have more than one account, and when they ban a blogger, they want it to reflect in all their accounts- now it will. This can only be done by our team, upon an Advertiser's request. We've been doing this manually for a short period now, so if you happen to find multiple bans, this is probably what happened.
Questions, comments, old family recipes? Be sure to send them to us by clicking on the Contact Support link, at the bottom of any page in your account. Thanks!
~P~
