Behind the scenes

... it might take a bit of time though. As you might have seen in the "News" section me and the wife had our first baby last Thursday. Since then we’ve been in hospital where there’s been lots of tests to see that everything’s okay and we can go home. Today is the first day we’re all home and it’s great to be able to be rid off all those nurses and doctors running around disturbing our good night’s sleep. Off course, they only want the best for us and the baby, but they sure can get on our nerves sometimes. Tomorrow we’ll get back for what’s hopefully a final checkup and we’ll hopefully get the stamp of approval. At the moment the baby’s not gaining the weight he should have, but at the rate he’s eating lately I find it difficult to believe they won’t be happy with the progress. :)

I’m hoping you’ll all have some patience with me as I simply don’t have the time to keep everything on the site up to date and answer emails promptly (well, I never really did that before either ;). Once we get in some sort of routine Driver Database will get back to normal.

... than resizing, rotating, cropping, sharpening, deleting and uploading three months worth of helmet photos. Once the dust had cleared 150 helmet photos were uploaded and the entire helmet queue gone! :)

This means that if you have sent in a helmet photo and it’s not present in the driver’s profile page you will have to ask yourself the following questions:

1. Was there actually a helmet present in the photo you uploaded as a "helmet photo"?
2. Was is actually a proper photograph, not an illustration?
3. Was the driver in question actually wearing the helmet?
4. Was the photograph at least somewhere near being in focus?
5. Was the photograph bigger than or equal to 130x116 pixels?

If you can answer yes to all the questions above I must have made some mistake when uploading your file. Please submit it once again.

If you answered no to any of the above questions you will have to find a new photograph to upload.

From now on when you log in to Driver Database you are automatically taken to your member dashboard. On that page you can see the information you have sent in that is currently in queue to be included and you can also re-submit information that was put "on hold" until additional information was added.

More features will be added. :)

I haven’t been receiving the information sent in to me using the "Notes" field in the forms for submitting new drivers or editing existing profile info (only for the profile info with name, birthdates etc - not for submitting race data). I had simply renamed the "Notes"-field in the database during some changes and missed updating a file which still pointed to the old name.

It’s fixed now and everything is back to normal. If you’ve written information in the "Notes" field I haven’t blatantly been ignoring you, I just haven’t seen it! Sorry about that.

It’s hard to believe, I’m sure, but I really am working hard on some new features for the site.

Next in line are improved member functions. Members will be able to see the data they have submitted, its place in the current queue and will be able to update their submissions if needed.

Work has also began on the next generation results reporting that hopefully will be in the hands of a few select members in not too long from now.

I’ve been a bit too busy to check the DriverDB email the last two days. That came back to bite me now and I had to spend two hours replying. It’s really nice to get all the feedback and I’m really sorry that you sometimes have to wait way too long to get a reply.

I decided to add a new little feature today. Some of you have noticed the "Fans" link on the drivers’ profile pages. Now there is a "Fans" link on the 2009 championship tables as well. Here’s an example:

http://www.driverdb.com/standings/1-2009/fans/

Now there are no excuses for not showing your support for your fave drivers! :D

It’s now possible for the drivers (and me!) to add YouTube clips in the blog posts. At least I hope it is. I haven’t tested it yet. If an YouTube clip will appear below this blog text, then you know I succeeded. :)

It’s been a long time since my last blog post. It’s been a long time since my blog was accessible from the right hand column as well. I sort of forgot to include it in after the re-design. Oops.

Anyway. A lot has happened since my last post. Thanks to my old friend Henrik Driver Database got a completely new look late last year. I hope you like it. I do. I only got some basic images from Henrik to work with so there are still many ways for me to fuck up his good design basis.

Yesterday I added a new fun little feature: the Fan section of driver’s profile pages.

If you’re a driver make sure you get all your supporters to "sign up" and if you’re not a driver make sure you support all your favourite drivers. If you have a DriverDB account and are logged in it’s dead simple to become fans of the drivers. If you don’t have an account you will need to validate your email address after you’ve become a fan of your first driver (to make it a bit harder for all the cheaters out there). You only need to validate the email address once, so once it’s validated you just need to keep using that email address in the Fan form and you will be added as a fan to the drivers directly.

Congrats to our new blogger Dennis Olsen on being the first to break the 10 fans mark! Who will break the 20 mark?

I’m still not quite ready for all the 2009 seasons yet. There will be some changes in the way we report race results and that’s where some hard work lies ahead.

I started this site in 2004 with about 100 pages related to the Formula 1 drivers of the 2004 season. Now, more than four years later it has grown a bit. How big is it, you ask?

Total number of pages: 210744 (at Dec 01)
Size of text in database: 47.5 MB

While 47.5 MB might not sound like much in this day of hard drive sizes in terabytes. But to get it in perspective, have a look at the following page:

http://philosophy.eserver.org/montaigne-essays.txt

That is a ASCII text on about 6300 lines with about 180000 words. Now multiply that with 47 and you will end up with a text file of about the same size as the data in the database.

And by the time I’ve written this I’m sure new pages have been created by our great contributers. :D

By the way, December 10 is not only the date when the voting of Driver of the Year will start. It will also be the day of the launch of the new design. At least I hope I’ll be able to make that deadline. ;)

One of Driverdb’s more hard working contributers Ross found a weird bug related to driver’s birthdates a few days ago. I took a look at it now and found out that PHP’s (the scripting language that forms the backbone of the site) mktime function that I use to translate the birth date (which is in a yyyy-mm-dd format) into a "Born January 25, 1945" type string doesn’t like years older than 1901. If a birth year is older than 1901 it would instead print out 2038 (which incidentally is the max year for the mktime-function).

The solution was simple, for years older than or equal to 1901 I had to do my own simple function to print out the text string.

This problem will reappear in 2040-something when drivers born in 2039 will appear and cause havoc. :D