Blog Posts From Active Product Development Tagged With development

Skin to Win

jspitzberg — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 20:29:27 GMT

New advertiser, and a "fun" new way to feature them on the site. We built a Gaiam "skin" for our Mind and Body channel.

I think it's a nice way to strongly brand the page without being obtrusive and getting in the way of the content that the user has come to the site to find. It's also not the most difficult implementation ever - which is nice. The trickiest part was getting the logo on the background image to be clickable. It took an anchor tag being blocked and relatively positioned to make that happen. Of course the hardest part of that was - and isn't everything - dealing with cross-browser DOM/box model inconsistencies.

Jumpcut to BrightCove

ActiveFergy — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:00:11 GMT

Active.com currently uses Jumpcut as its video provider. With support for Jumpcut waning, we have decided to move our content to a new provider – BrightCove. BrightCove offers a newly updated product and an extensive API. We have already begun implementing BrightCove’s video player on some of our pages (see our Tour de France page) and we look forward to working with their services.

The difficulty, of course, is always in the details. You can see from our video edit page that Jumpcut allows videos to be edited within a web browser. These edits are stored by Jumpcut and when a video is requested, the finalized version is created on the fly and shown in a flash viewer. The current issue is one of retrieval. What is an effective method for making these videos downloadable? Requests to Jumpcut for this information have not been forthcoming.

Interestingly, another website, ClipNabber, allows users to download flash videos from video providers such as YouTube, Yahoo Videos, and Jumpcut. There are some Jumpcut limitations which prevent us from retrieving all of our content, but we can at least begin the process with some of our videos.

Once this issue of retrieval is resolved we can copy the content, titles and descriptions for transfer into BrightCove. More to come as we dive deeper into the migration process!

Scaling results.active.com

JeremyGThomas — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 20:30:49 GMT

results.active.com is our hub for communicating race results to people. We train event timers on how to use the backend portion of the system, and after a given race is completed the timers upload results, making them available to the world at large.

We typically see a lot of traffic on results.active.com after large events, such as the Marine Corps Marathon or the Chicago Marathon. And to be fair, results.active.com hasn't had an exemplary performance record when it comes to handling the volume spikes we get on the Monday after major events.

We've just released a major update to results.active.com adding 3X the scalability we had before. We've also made tweaks to the architecture so that we can add additional servers to the load-balancer should we get any unanticipated increases in volume.

So if you see any issues with site responsiveness please let me know (here on this blog) and I'll look to it personally and immediately.

Linking Events

JeremyGThomas — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:58:47 GMT

Predominantly people use our site to find events to participate in. Events like the or the Turkey Trot in Cartersville, GA. We have over 300,000 relevant events in our system. And by relevant I mean things that have recently happened or will be happening in the near future. Past events are archived and are a lot harder to find in our system, but we're working to fix this.

For example, the San Diego Rock 'n' Roll Marathon happens every year. Yet if you search through our system you'll only find next year's event (and possibly last year's). But what did people say about the event in 2004? Was it well run by the event organizer? What was the weather like?

Linking data from past events is one of the projects we're working on in our Directory Initiative. You'll be able to understand what people have said about previous occurrences of an event and can make a better decision about whether or not you'll participate this year.

Oh yeah and we're also working to make our event details pages load faster. Right now we receive a YSlow score of 'F', which we're not proud of. But I can say things are in the works in our prototype environment that will give us a better score. Changes will be rolled out incrementally, as we're touching several areas to "lighten the payload".

It's all about the Core

JeremyGThomas — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 22:20:19 GMT

On the Product Development side here at Active we haven't done a great job of communicating with our audience. We're hoping to change that now.

I'm a Development Manager with the Participants side of the Active Media Properties (AMP), the team responsible for www.active.com, results.active.com and community.active.com (we also have a few services/widgets we develop and support behind the scenes). We are distributed, with some people working from China, others in Michigan and even others in LA. But the bulk of us work out of the San Diego office.

I worked for a long while as a Management Consultant implementing waterfall-based projects with various Fortune 1000 companies. Consulting companies love waterfall. Changes in scope = more dollars in the pocket. But I've always been troubled by the inefficiencies that are inherent to waterfall and to the disconnectedness it brings to the parties involved in delivering a project. So I was keen to implement Agile software development with my team here. Agile is hard with remote resources I quickly discovered. But I digress.

But then came our "Directory Initiative". In simple terms, we use the word "Directory" to describe search.active.com and the mechanism through which we submit information to it. Active is a network (my company is actually called "The Active Network"), and we are a conglomerate having acquired multiple companies throughout the years. Each of these companies have interesting artifacts (or "nouns"), such as classes, campgrounds, marathons, training plans etc., and search.active.com aggregates these making them discoverable to our consumers.

Directory is the core of what we do here within AMP. And we've recently launched a major program, the "Directory Initiative", to enhance and harden those features on our properties that are related to it. To do this we've split the team into smaller teams and have aligned each with a Product Manager. Although we've only just begun, organizing our resources in this way has already paid off (at least with internal demos). So, while we may not be fully Agile, the hybrid model we've adopted is promising.

More to come.