Web cell revival, hallelujah!
Hello and welcome to my first blog! My dev name is Garthagk and I will be your guide on today's tour. First a bit of introduction. Those of you who were at Fanfest this year might have heard Halldór talking about how CCP is organized into small groups of programmers called "cells".
Well, I'm the newest member of the Web Cell. As a group, we are generally responsible for all of the web sites you interact with. Whether it be CCP Games, EVE Online, MyEVE, or one of the many others. We are also responsible for all sorts of internal sites such as the EVE Server Pages (ESP) -- a huge internal site that handles all sorts of tasks from allowing Game Masters to do their work to giving operations access to watch the cluster from the inside.
My particular job in the web cell is to be the "community web person". That means I am taking over a lot of t20's excellent work. He's gone on to a different role within the company as of a few months back, and until now, there's not been anybody dedicated to pick up the things he was on. Now there is!
Everybody buy a round for t20 and all his effort in the past to give us an awesome web site. Cheers, dude. I'll be bugging you daily for the next year, don't you worry!
The Present
Let's move on to talk a bit about the state of the web site in the present. There are a nice set of issues with the web site that are well known here within the office. I'm going to run down the list of things that I know of that are bouncing around the top of my head.
- Forum portrait rendering
Yes, I'm tired of my newer alts having no faces too. This is actually a pretty high priority for us. The reason it hasn't been taken care of is basically that we needed to wait for Revelations to come out. The code that actually generates the images is a custom client that had to be patched in to the Kali branch.
Well, the code's been done and is part of the upcoming patch this week. After that's out, we have to work with the operations cell to get a replicated file system setup so that we can have two render nodes doing the work and sharing effort. Once that's in place, we should be done.
- Item database not updated
This is almost done. We've been waiting on Revelations to stabilize. It'd be annoying if we had to render the data out multiple times, because the tools we use to do this aren't the most fun to use. (Takes a rather lot of hours to babysit the entire process, and we're not keen on doing it more than once without grave need.)
Anyway, this is presently in the works. Hopefully be done this week.
- Forum session issues
Sometimes you get logged out, sometimes you get redirected in a loop, sometimes you end up as an alt for no real reason. This is all pretty bad behavior for a web site. We know what causes this - sort of, but we haven't a fix for it. Not yet, anyway. This ties in with the future plans, as you'll see in a minute.
- Character sheet disabled frequently
This is something that happens based on database and webserver load. From time to time we have to disable the charsheet to let things ease up a bit. We try to keep the time this is done to a minimum, of course. Hopefully this will not have to happen anymore when we finish the plans I'm going to mention later on in this blog.
Anyway, I'm sure there are other things that are just bugging you. Well, good news is, I am fairly active on the forums. I tend to hear all the complaints and experience most of the problems personally! Say hi sometime when you see me around.
The Future
These are some ideas and things that are planned for the future. Please don't take any of this as gospel - the future is always cloudy, but I want you to have an idea of some of the major things we're working on.
- Third party data availability
One of my pet projects is that I absolutely love the people who make third party sites and utilities. Let's face it, there are far more of you than there are of us, so it's best if we can get you the information you need so you can make awesome tools for everybody to use.
I would love to start supporting third party developers more. I've been in touch with at least one group and they've asked for some data exports (map data such as sovereignty on systems, etc) - so, there are lots of ideas, now we're just investigating feasibility and such.
- Transitioning to ASP.NET
This is the really big one. You may have noticed that our newer sites (such as the support pages) are written in ASP.NET. The older stuff is classic ASP which, while a useful tool, is just not giving us enough flexibility going forward.
With that in mind, a project has started to rewrite the MyEVE site in ASP.NET. This is, as you can imagine, a fairly sizable project. One of the big goals is to correct a lot of the architectural issues that we've run into with the old code. With the new site we will be able to resolve the session issues and other problems with the existing site.
- Other things
There are always tons of little projects running around that don't warrant some space here. Things like fixing up the pages for the third alliance tournament, fixing typos here and there, updating the corporate web site, etc. We never run out of things to do, really.
Signing Off
Time to get back to work. That and looping the RealX mix from FanFest. That was the best time I've ever had, I think, and I can't wait for next year - already!
