The Official bragster blog

Hey bragsters,

Just a quick note to inform you of some changes and explain some of the recent craziness on bragster.com from the technical perspective. You would have noticed some major performance improvements to all things notification-based on the site. Basically, we were following through on the stuff we talked about earlier in the month here.

Due to time constraints, it took a little longer than expected but its all done now, and the techs can finally breathe a sigh of relief! So all in all we went down between 7:30 and 9:30 pm Monday evening, then from 9:30 pm were online without notifications, then went back online at 1:00 on Wednesday am with improved notifications – leaving you guys without notifications for a total of 28 hours. We know this would have been a bit frustrating – but in usual bragster style you guys were lovely and patient. Big time thankyous, we understand how frustrating this can be.

So all in all, you will notice improvements in:

• Your full feed page
• Your feed summary on “my home” page
• Mini -feeds on profiles and dare pages
• Inbox and private messages
• Feed popup

Enjoy, bragsters!

-Peter

Hey guys,

A quick update to let you know that the site will be down for about 5 minutes in the next hour or so. As you may have noticed, the Feed is very slow for heavy users and we’re rolling out some improvements for that later today. This means the site will be down for about 5 minutes, and then the Feed section will be outdated for about 2 hours while it is reprocessing all that data.

We’re also rolling out significant improvements for your email preference settings hopefully by the end of this week that will allow you to more precisely define which events you want to be notified about. So for example if you want to receive emails when a bragster you’re a fan of uploads a new brag, you will be able to customize this on a person by person basis. Next on the list will be the tweaking of the Bragging Rights algorithm, yay!

Take care my fellow bragsters, Wim

As one of the designers at bragster, it’s a bit odd that my first blog post here is about Ruby, but we all get stuck in with all sorts in the bragster garage so here goes.

I should also note that at least for the time being we’re gonna keep this kind of ‘techy’ blog post off the main page and in relevant dev sections. That means they probably won’t show up in the main blog feed either, so if they peak your interest, you’ll need to subscribe to the feed for this section separately.

On to the topic at hand!

One thing that crops up again and again in the bragster codebase is attempting to display a bit of data that may or may not actually exist depending on the circumstances. The kind of thing where you normally end up using this:

user ? user.display_name : nil

Chris Wanstrath has come up with try() so that instead you can just do this:

user.try(:display_name)

Looks pretty handy and I’m gonna give it a whirl to see if we should start using it at bragster.