Good progress despite ‘issues’

Sunday, 30th August 2009Short URL

On Wednesday night I wrote down a list of 5 key things that I wanted to add/fix/change before launch. They were:

  • “Fix” the friend/follower lists – allow you to follow/unfollow directly from the list, and to block a user if desired.
  • Blocking users – I’ve had the code written for weeks, it just wasn’t hooked up to anything.
  • Ability to delete Direct Messages – because… I’d forgotten to add it back in…
  • Menu cleanup – for post 4.0 needs…
  • Re-enable auto-refresh on combined timelines.

I made great progress on Thursday night added the ability to delete old direct messages and got most of the friend/follower list changes done, I then finished them off on Friday. The menu cleanup wasn’t really high priority, but as it was relatively easy I knocked that off pretty quick too. Then came the weekend.

Hahlo4 Followers list Updated Hahlo 4 Menu

After having a mostly lazy Saturday I sat down to finish adding “user blocking” to the profile pages, but before I did that I decided to cleanup some of the old/unused files that were floating around. I deleted (or moved) a bunch of disused images and a couple of js files… then I went to commit the changes to my SVN… epic fail. I’m not sure what went wrong (apart from likely user error) but I ruined my working copy on my local machine and it wouldn’t let me check the code back out. Then when I finally got it check the code out it wouldn’t let me recommit it. It took over an hour but I finally got it “working” again. Sometimes I think SVN is more pain than its worth. So Saturday was a waste, didn’t feel like doing any more coding after I got that working.

So today (Sunday) I had another crack at the user blocking bits and pieces that needed finishing, but before that I sync’d my working copy dev.hahlo.com using Transmit that same way that I do a dozen times a night… and for some reason it deleted my htaccess file… my non-backed-up htaccess file… I written a new htaccess file now (I thin its the same…) and at the same time added gzip compression and played around with the cache expiry times on resources to try and help speed things up a little. Gzipping the js and css alone appears to have saved around 150kb, so hopefully load times should be improved, maybe. I’ve also just finished cleaning up my css, which cut 6kb from its un-gzipped size.

After that was sorted I added a block button to the bottom right of user profiles (in addition to the block button you’ll find on the friend/follower lists – access it by tapping the cog). I’ve also added a “Blocks” page, which you can access from the menu, this page lists all the users that you’ve already block, and allows you to unblock them if you so desire.

The only thing on my list I haven’t yet looked at is re-enabling the auto-refresh on the combined timelines (friend+mentions, friends+messages etc.). It was originally left out because of the relatively low api calls per hour limit (which I think was about 75 when I started work on H4), this limit is now 150 per hour so that’s less of an issue. I’ve also got to add caching to these timelines (friends timeline, mentions, user timeline and a few others are currently cached for 1 minute to try and reduce api calls when you jump back and forth between a couple of pages quickly). Assuming I hit no hurdles, I will try and get this complete for 4.0.