Weeknotes #287

Left: Fox in Clover by Little Ram Studio (actual art). Right: artist’s impression of ‘Froxy’ (by Doug). Not to be confused. 

Doug here, doing the week notes. Sorry it’s been a while – I lost my felt-tips when I moved house a couple of months ago, but I’ve found them again, now.

So what’s been happening in the last week? Well, the main thing for me has been implementing and deploying something I’ve been calling ‘Froxy’. This is a service that sits in front of the various Folksy services and allows them all to be accessed from the standard folksy.com host (which means no more beta.folksy.com for shop URLs, for instance). It does this by inspecting the requests that come in to Folksy, applying a set of rules based on the their URLs and then proxying each request to the correct service.

The advantages to this work are not just cosmetic. With the Froxy service in place, it means that we can much more easily develop new functionality in isolation from the rest of the service, then seamlessly slot it in once it has completed. Which is a boon. And therefore good news. This work was deployed on Wednesday morning, with a couple of bugfixes throughout the day as issues were spotted and squished, and it is all looking pretty good so far. Oh, and the beta-style shop URLs (like beta.folksy.com/shops/folksy for example) should still be fine. They’ll just redirect to the correct URL now (folksy.com/shops/folksy in our example).

I got the name ‘Froxy’ by concatenating the ‘F’ from ‘Folksy’ and the ‘roxy’ from ‘proxy’. Yes, I really am that clever.

We’ve also been finessing some other things, like the selection of Folksy Favourites that appear in the Smorgasbord on the front page. Serial clickers of the ‘refresh content button (and I have to include myself in that number) reported seeing some items repeated more than they thought was interesting, so we’ve increased the pool of items those get drawn from.

Another thing we’ve been looking at is ways to make joining Folksy a more pleasant process for new users. That work is ongoing and incremental, but we should be seeing the first improvements there in the next couple of weeks.

Oh, and some of the Folksy T-Shirts have been listed in the Folksy store! There are two listed at the time of writing, but who knows how many there will be when you’re reading this? [Editor’s note: There are now seven designs up there and ready to wear!] You can read more about the day we made them over on the Folksy Tumblr.

Oh, and in case I haven’t mentioned something really important that happened on Friday, that’ll be because I’m writing this on Thursday, and that’ll be because I’m off on holiday on Friday. Whoo-hoo! :)

Doug x

PS. I have been mostly listening to this >>