SIGS SIGS SIGS!!!

Learned a lot of stuff from sigs, namely the flakiness of the armory. Finishing up some other cool stuff for sigs and working out the bugs in development.

What is the appeal of a Template?

As I begin to get back to creating new and exciting templates, I took a moment yesterday with Stephen to do a little research on the templates that are most used here at Guild Launch. I was surprised by the results and could not help but wonder what about certain templates appeals to you (you being our awesome users)? Is it the simplicity? colors? theme? ease of customization? As the designer of the templates you love to use, I would love to know what the draw is. Can I get a little insight please?

According to the search results the "Redux Red" template is one of the favorite templates used. I decided that people must like it because of it's simplicity and color. I would have guessed ease of modification but very few people modified it besides the uploading of a header.









The Wrath of the Lich King Template, a heavy theme driven template and guess what? It is the all time favorite template amongst our users. My thoughts are that I created it using nothing but WoW elements. It is not easily customizable unless you are experienced with CSS and other then a header change I haven't seen much customization. So what is it with this one?








I am on a quest to discover what is it about certain templates you, our users want to see more of. Simple? Game Themed? Or, just darn cool?

Page Load Performance Optimizations

Guild Launch has excellent page load speeds. That being said, in recent releases we've been laying the groundwork for further page load optimizations. We are doing this as a proactive measure to deliver you the best Guild Hosting possible and make your experience with Guild Launch the best we can.

At it's core the time it takes a web page to load is connected to the time it takes for the server to create the page. Here at Guild Launch our page creations times are very fast at 80% less than or equal to 1/10th of a second, the heavy use of Rapid Raid reporting and lists which calculate a fair amount of data skew this somewhat. Our external monitoring shows that average page loads from various places in the U.S. range from .4 seconds to .7 seconds with some outliers probably due to internet load times more than our servers. These page creation times and load times are primarily due to having multiple very fast database servers and a farm of web machines working to serve you all web pages. Not to mention the smaller server farm for SigLaunch.com.

However, we can get even faster. So, we've embarked on four initiatives:

1. Use more Ajax
2. Use more server side compression
3. Use More Domains
   
4. Utilize a Content Delivery Network

Use More Ajax

Many times the perception of page loads is more important than the reality. Using Ajax makes the application feel more snappy, it also reduces the reload of the template and related information and lets the servers focus on delivering just the content needed. Ajax is a major win from the user interaction side of things, which is critically important. Ajax does not necessarily improve page load times when you are just browsing around the site however, so we have additional options.

Use More Server Side Compression

Our web servers have the ability to compress JavaScript and CSS. We had a problem with it a while back, but recent upgrades mean that those problems should be solved. As of Sunday March 15th we are now compressing more of this content. The benefit should be subtle but noticeable for our U.S. users and may be quite noticeable for our European and Oceanic users.

Use More Domains

In the 6.1 release we will begin serving most static content from seperate domains from the GuildLaunch.com site. This will allow your browser to more fully use your available bandwidth and will enable more parallel downloads. This should speed up page loads for our U.S. users appreciably, and again have an even more noticeable impact for our European and Oceanic users.

Utilize a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Once we have the content on a seperate domain we will be able to begin using a Content Delivery Network. We're still laying out the plan and timeline for this, but it is absolutely a goal of ours for 2009, hopefully early 2009. A CDN will allow us to actually move our static content closer to our users by having a server in regions of the U.S. and possibly a server in Europe that serves this content. The net effect is less latency for the 20-20 static items that make up a given webpage while allowing our primary servers to focus on generating and serving the dynamic part of the content equation. A CDN will have an impact for our users worldwide.

I hope you've enjoyed the roadmap for our page load time optimization. Our goal here is to improve upon our already fantastic site performance and to make it even better. We will keep you all updated as these initiatives progress.

-Stephen

Eve Online - Apocrypha = Awesome

Eve Online has made a major upgrade with the Apocrypha expansion. An awesome free expansion that nearly doubles the game world size. If you've ever played Eve and aren't playing anymore, this is an awesome time to give it a go again.

They've revamped the starter tutorial, they've added new "wormhole space" that is completely uncharted, they've revamped the scanning system, and they've added a *SKILL QUEUE*. The skill queue is simply awesome. You can queue up 24 hours worth of skill training and don't have to worry about waking up early or staying up late to train.

So, since I'm posting this at 1:00am... I'm spending my time staying up late to play the game.

We'll be releasing an Apocrypha template over at Guild Launch soon. Woot!

-Stephen

Alliances, Alliances, Friends & Foes

So, we've been reviewing Guild Alliance functionality the last few days and working out a plan to integrate Alliance functionality into Guild Launch. I realize this sounds easy, but when it comes to actually providing functionality for Alliances and not just a "list of guilds we like" this results in a tremendous amount of steam coming from our brains. Fortunately, we've got an awesome team and lots of water.....

So, expect some kick ass Alliance functionality in one of the next releases.

And, as a special bonus tease... a character will be able to join multiple guilds after we release this functionality.

Enjoy!
Stephen

Safari 4 - Browser Wars Heating Up?

First off, I'm not an Apply fanboi. Apple makes some great products, but as with anything they have their role and their demographic they appeal to. I've played with Safari on Windows and Safari on Mac and I've always felt it was lackluster and believed that Firefox was a hands down better browser.

That being said... I've been playing with the Safari 4 beta and it's *awesome*. It's fast, they use native text rendering now so the text doesn't look like garbage and like I said it's actually an awesome browser now.

I hope to get in some more time with it, but first impressions are that they've really done a good job of fixing Safari's major flaws. The browser wars are heating up and it seems that security and performance are the current battleground which is definitely a win for users.

-Stephen

Guild Launch v 5.4 Upcoming Changes

We have been hard at work here at Guild Launch on some major changes coming in what is, for now, called Version 5.4 of Guild Launch. These changes include:

Translation of Signification Portions of Guild Launch

1. Full translation of forum text into Chinese, French, German, Russian and Spansih
2. Translation of the login and header bar into Chinese, French, German, Russian and Spanish
3. Additions to allow Guild admins to select the guilds default language.
4. Additions to allow a user to select their personal preferred language.
5. After this release we will be trying to translate one section of the site per release until we have everything translated. Our focus is on translating the areas that users encounter first and most often which is why we focused on the login bar and the forums for this release.

Upgrades to the Guild Launch Profiler for WoW

1. The profiler has had some lingering bugs fixed
2. The character profiles on the site have been significantly upgraded and include much more of the information and stata that users want to see.
3. Achievement info is now tracked

Guild Achievement Tracker

1. This new feature will allow you to track your guild member's achievements with the profiler and to view who has completed which achievements.
2. Achievements can be marked as being "Tracked"
3. Tracked achievements can be shown in a widget

A new Look for the Main Guild Launch Site

1. The main Guild Launch site was designed more than 2 years ago and while we loved it then we felt it needed a remake.
2. The new version has a more modern feel and Vicki has put a lot of hard work into making it look awesome.

A new Signature Generator

1. We'll be releasing a new Signature generator to limited beta with this release.
2. This new signature generator has updated stats and updated graphics and is just slicker overall
3. The new site will also have some other new features for guilds to use... we'll announce those later. :)

Guild Launch Raid Tracking

In late December we took over development of DKPMon. We've spent a good deal of time in January integrating DKPmon into the ecology of our WoW Raid Tracking mods. In this release we will have major upgrades, including:

1. A new Raid Tracker "DKPmon Logging" mode. This mode will turn the raid tracker into a logger for DKPmon events. This mode allows you to use DKPmon to track DKP for boss kills and item awards and to have those events tracked in the raid tracker. They can then be imported into the site with no reentry of the data. This sounds small, but it's ABSOLUTELY HUGE.
2. The Raid Tracker has had UI enhancements including more menu options and the abiltity to create events with name and DKP value of your choosing via an "/rt addevent" command. This is huge too because it will cut down on editing of events for everyone who tracks various events throughout the raid such as wipes, attendances, attempts, etc.

Much more....

1. UI enhancements
2. Admin enhancements
3. Signup Enhancements
4. Character creation enhancements
5. more!

We have more to go in this release. It's going to be a large release, with a ton of enhancements and much more than just the highlights that I've mentioned here. The timeframe for this release is currently mid February.

Enjoy!
Stephen