Behind the scenes

The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

Yup, you heard it here first. I’m not dead. :D

I have been pretty busy lately and with spare time being pretty non existent this past half year this has meant I’ve been falling behind on stuff I really expected to and wanted to be able to keep up with. As Driver Database is very far from being my full time job (you get pay cheques from jobs, right?) it has had to suffer a little.

I’ve been able to keep up with most of the results, as it’s top priority. Big thanks goes out to everyone who’s helping out with the results - take a look at the "Top members" to see that there are people with extreme dedication. :)

What I’ve not been able to do is to keep up with all the mails coming in to Driverdb lately. Just the mailing is about a two hour job each day so you can imagine what happens if you haven’t had time to look in the inbox for a week or so. :(

I’ve also not been able to develop all the functions I had hoped would be ready. But it’s coming along...

There will be some changes to Driver Database in time for the 2010 season. In order to keep the site going and improving some of the new features and some of the more time consuming features (publishing press releases!) will be made paid services. It won’t affect the visitors or the driver profile pages (apart from the news section) but drivers will be able to add a couple of new features to their profiles for a small yearly fee. The features will include publishing of a detailed biography, links, logos and description of sponsors, basic Facebook, blog and Twitter syndication, Q&A, a contact page and more. One of the most important changes these paid extras will mean is a top priority when it comes to updates - with a goal of being able to add them within one or two business days.

I’m currently working on this and a couple of more things. Here’s the current to-do list:

* Move driver blogs to Worpress MU = more fun for our bloggers.
* New driver profile features.
* New advertising system.
* Make changes to the results reporting system for 2010 so new results can be added faster, easier and by more people.

I’ve got a new email address, by the way. The old gmail address will be phased out eventually. Have a look at the "Contact" page in the blue menu. :)

We are in the very final stages of voting in the Driver Database / Grand Prix Shootout poll and we’ll soon be able to tell which three lucky drivers can enter Grand Prix Shootout without paying the entry fee.

In order for your vote to count your email address must be validated. This is easiest done by clicking the link in the automatic email sent out after you’ve entered your email address and clicked the vote button. In some cases though this email doesn’t reach the recipient. It is therefor very important to follow the instructions that are written below the "Important" header (also available in the voting rules).

In short you need to send an email from the email address you used when voting (which off course needs to be without typos) to gpspoll@driverdb.com or to driverdb@gmail.com. Your vote will then be validated manually.

It is very important that you actually send an email using the email address you voted with in order for me to find that email address in the list of non-validated emails.

Keep on voting!

Yesterday I added a back up validation email for the Grand Prix Shootout poll to maximize the chances of all voters getting a validation email. This send email was sent through my regular Gmail address. That proved to be a pretty dumb move as Gmail has a limit on the number of emails you can send out in a day. So, the bottom line is I hit that limit and now have to wait 24 hours before I can send out an email from that account again. Doh!

I can’t stress enough though that every voter can still validate their vote by simply sending an email to either the @driverdb.com or the @gmail.com address as described under the BIG blinking "Important" header you will see after you have voted. So, not receiving any validation emails doesn’t mean your vote will not be counted; you just have to be able to read two or three lines of instructions. ;)

Driver Database has been extremely shaky this last week. All the extra visitors coming in to vote for their favourite drivers in the Driver Database / Grand Prix Shootout poll were too much for our poor old server to handle.

There was no choice but to order a new one. It was set up in the middle of this week, but the constant system load on the old server meant the hosting company had trouble connecting to that server and transfer the account, files and data onto the new one. So it kind of dragged on a bit. Once the files were in place I realised there had been a swap in the character set for the MySQL databases, which meant all foreign characters were replaced with what can only be described as alien characters. So the MySQL import had to be re-done by me and that meant a few extra hours before the characters were correct again (the fact that the new server had a newer version of MySQL didn’t really help).

Yesterday the setup was complete and we changed the DNS records to point to the new IP of the new server.

For you geeks out there, this is what we’re currently on:

CPU: Intel Pentium 4 2.4 GHz
RAM: 1 GB
Disk space: 100GB
Bandwidth: 900 GB
Operating system: Linux CentOS 5.3

I’ve now semi-incorporated the Wordpress news blog that I’ll puvblish all future press releases on to the site. As you can see on the front page, it’s kind of working now. There are still a few weird characters to handle as the Wordpress blog seems to be working with a different character set than the rest of the site.

In order to keep me from going through the inner workings of Wordpress I decided to just do it the easy way and include all WP functions in the DriverDB script. It seemed to be working perfectly, until I logged in on DriverDB and automatically was logged out every time I returned to the front page. Short cuts never work. The news are now pulled directly from the db instead and no WP functions are being used.

The published press releases does not show up on the driver’s profile pages yet though. As I couldn’t do any short cuts I need to figure out how WP handles it’s tags. It shouldn’t be too much of a problem I hope, I just haven’t had time to look at it yet.

... and I’m still only on August 8th... which reminds me that NOFX made a song about that date. See youtube clip.

On another note we’re making good progress on getting back the lost drivers now. 3592 to go - I think we started at over 8000 missing. Thanks for all the hard work guys! :D

As you may have noticed the press releases on the front page and on the driver profile pages haven’t been updated in a long while. They will be back though, it’s just that I’m currently switching systems for the press releases. In order to save time the future press releases will be published in a Wordpress blog. The blog is set up and I’ve started adding releases to it. I just need to integrate it into the front page and the driver profiles.

Here it is, by the way:
http://news.driverdb.com

Not good news. I’ve managed to screw up again. The part of the database that stores the driver names and ID-numbers was emptied. No biggie, I thought as I carry out daily backups that gets emailed to me on a Google mail account.

When I looked at my inbox I discovered that for the last couple of months the files that have been sent to me from the back ups are 0 bytes big. That’s not good.

After checking my local disks for the latest manual back up I made I’ve now uploaded a temporary version from April. This means that all data for at least 34,333 drivers are working correctly. I do have a more recent back up (from the middle of May) that I need to work around a bit to get working. Hopefully this one adds a few hundred drivers more. :(

It’s worth noting, however, that there hasn’t been any loss of any other data, so all the latest race results, photos and what-nots are still available for the drivers with ID numbers less than 34,333.

With the use of some detective work some of the lost drivers can be brought back to life without a newer back up too. But it’s not easy.

ARGH!

Note to self, always back up before working directly with the MySQL database.

... 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. :)