We didn't get a chance to post until right now, but yesterday's improvement is hopefully helpful. We added maps to member profiles so that you can easily determine where someone is located at-a-glance. We'll let the screenshot do the talking.
If you guys really like this, we will make the maps better in the future. We could add nearby members to the map, make it interactive, etc. So let us know what you think!
Sorry to keep with the not-so-visible improvements, but today was more bug fixes.
A couple items fixed today include a couple tiny layout fixes, a fix to further optimize external images, and added logging to keep track of more feature use throughout Pedal Room.
More exciting updates will be coming tomorrow! We promise!
Tonight's small improvement is not really small, but also not really visible.
We've been slaving away working on some infrastructure improvements, including modifying the database and working on a new backend to handle some upcoming features, like a marketplace! We've also added more logging so we can better respond to problems with the site, and found a few bugs that we'll be fixing in the coming days. Expect some cool new stuff soon!
Today we added some new photo sharing options. We'll let the screenshot below do the talking. Enjoy, and let us know what you think!
...was unfortunately missing a small improvement. We were pretty slammed with other Pedal Room work, a bike ride, and an awesome rock show, and couldn't find time to build anything out for the site. We're sorry!
But we'll make up for it today with more improvements to the site! Check back later today!
Today we were going to finish up image enhancements, but ran into some technical difficulties that need to be attended to and will take longer than planned. So instead we fixed several backend bugs.
These bugs all affect core components of the code (and one improves login/authentication security). Tomorrow the image sharing stuff will be online!
Today we laid the groundwork for enhanced image sharing. Our server can now dynamically create optimized photos for other sites to display. Here's a little example:
I have a bike, such as my Cannondale Track, on Pedal Room. I want to show off a photo of the bike somewhere - maybe a forum or a blog.
Starting tomorrow, you'll be able to find a photo on Pedal Room and get sharing options, including the raw photo URL, HTML, and BB code. The optimized image can then be displayed elsewhere, and it will indicate that it came from Pedal Room. Then others not only save time by loading an optimized image, but they can also can find their way to Pedal Room to find more bike photos and details.
It should be pretty cool, and we've done all the hard infrastructure work to support this already. Tomorrow we'll have the finished work done and on the site!
Today we made Pedal Room even faster!
Recently, we realized that some of our small thumbnail images are way bigger in file size than they should be. We were seeing 48x48 pixel images that should be around 2 kilobytes actually being as big as 67 kilobytes.
We figured out the problem almost instantly - we'd forgotten to strip color profiles and comments out of images as we sized them down to create thumbnail images.
So today we fixed the code to strip the extra data out of images when we resize them. From now on, all photos added to Pedal Room will be missing this extra data. This is good - the photos will load faster and will look the same as before. That solved part of the problem. However, this was only part of the problem - the existing images on the server still needed to be optimized.
So we wrote some scripts that run on the server and optimize existing images. Basically, the script converts all images, one-by-one. For each image, if the converted image has a 5% or greater reduction in filesize, we throw out the original and replace it with the optimized version.
For every one of the thousands of thumbnail images we optimized, we reduced file size by an average of 62.7%. For the tiny 48x48 pixel images on the site (the ones you see on the home page in the random photos area for example), we saved 28.7 megabytes. Massive savings were also made elsewhere, including in the regular thumbnails.
This translates into faster load times, and reduced server load and hosting costs. Win win!
Today's small improvement was making Pedal Room a bit faster.
First and foremost, we now load random photos on the home page (and browse bikes page) after the rest of the page has finished loading. This makes the rest of the page load faster than normal, while images take about as long as before to load.
We also spent a good amount of time tweaking the server, and added far-future cache-expire headers to static images, CSS, and JavaScript. We also added ETags that work properly. In English, this means that your browser should keep a local copy of static images and files so that it doesn't have to load as much on every page.
We still have a lot we can and will do to make Pedal Room faster! Tomorrow we may do more speed improvements, or maybe something different. Stay tuned!
