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These are links to some of the major sections in the mixtape collective.
  • Lists: Browse various lists that are generated by the loads of data we have collected.
  • Contests: Check out the latest contests, see previous winners, and find out how you can be a part
  • Music: Check out our ever-growing database of musical knowledge! Use it to find any artist, album, or track that has been entered since the birth of the site and rate and find detailed usage statistics.

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Development Log Archives

Logs

The Development Log Archives chronicle all of the development log posts made by our site admins. If we said, it's in here.
Page 5  |  Total Results: 146  |  Showing: 81 - 100
Contest III Results and Contest IV!
9/21/06 09:53pm
Contest III is over. Congratulations to d-loot, eric (cheater), and ParYen. A round of applause for all those who participated.

We noticed that not as many people made mixes for contest III, so we decided to amp it up a bit for Mix Contest IV. I won't spoil any of it here; head to the contests page to find out more. It's going to be epic.

contest III - Extended
9/21/06 08:09am
It's been extended until this evening...
I was working on it last night, but couldn't finish...

real life is too damn busy!

Contest III: one week left
By eric
9/13/06 03:25pm
Contest III has just about a week left until the winners are decided. Get out there and vote.

Also, if anyone has any good ideas for future mix-contests, let me know. I can't promise badges, but I will promise smiles and brownie points.

Contest II / III
By eric
9/06/06 10:12pm
First off, congrats to Alice (who had her mix shoot to the top of the OVERALL MIXTAPE CHART), sledgbrainerd and galaxiepi for tearing up mixtape contest II. Points and badges have been awarded. Go congratulate our winners.

Great work to all of you. I think as a whole, we're all becoming better mixtapers.

With that, contest III has started. Click the ad on the front page to read the details. Same as usual. Two weeks to play, points and badges to the top 3.

Rock out, y'all.

RIP STEVE.

Contest II update
By eric
9/05/06 05:33pm
Contest II is almost completed. One more day left until badges and points and honor and fame and all that other jazz are issued. If you haven't made your mixtape yet, do it. If you haven't voted yet, do it.

Great work, crew. Rock out y'all.

Temporary Shutdown
9/01/06 04:01pm
I am shutting down the site for like 10-15 minutes to test something that may greatly improve our site performance.

Contest II!
By eric
8/22/06 10:14pm
Contest II is active. Go to the contest section to read about it. 200 points are on the line AND an ultrasavage badge designed by yours truly. Get to mixin'!

In other updates, things have been slow on my end. I'm doing some side-project design that is taking up lots of my time, but in the process, I may have stumbled across a new logo for the MTC. Only time will tell.

Rock out, y'all.

Message Mayhem
8/14/06 06:03pm
For unknown reasons the message center went nutso.

The last activity for 90% of the messages was set to 3:14 this afternoon. We are investigating.

This seems odd as we have not modified the message center in 5 months and have never ran into a problem like this.

We'll keep you posted.

Forum quoting
By eric
8/10/06 08:04pm
I just spent way too long trying to come up with some elegant way to implement forum posting, but due to the existing structure of how things get handled, i had to go with a super-basic one.

But still, it's there. Hope that helps.

Rock on.

Misc News
8/10/06 06:14am
First of all, our first mixtape contest went off great. Some of the entries were pretty incredible. Congratulations to our winners:

1st - Alice
2nd - claireillinoise
3rd - galaxiepi

We'll finish tidying up after this one and get another contest started shortly.

Also, Eric and I met yesterday to discuss our 2.0 strategy. It's going to be pretty bitching, but it will be slow coming.

Additionally, some of the small downtime and general sluggishness of the site has been bugging me...so I wrote some code to analyze some of our database communication in order to isolate what is slowing us down.

The results were pretty surprising. Nearly all of the slowdown on the site (20ish sec load times, 5 min lockouts, etc) can be directly pinpointed to just a few isolated things.

First, activating a mix was causing some really inefficient code to run which completely locked everyone out of the site for upwards of 200-300 seconds. I changed a "ANY(" to an "IN(" and it seems to have fixed it. 4 mixes were activated afterwards and took no more than 15 seconds each to process!

Some other culprits are random artist/album/track. Based on the analysis, these are taking upwards of 50-60 seconds on average. I won't take their functionality out, but I'd recommend not using them for a day or two until I optimize them.

Finally, narcissism is going to be temporarily removed (don't worry, we'll still be getting data and will bring it back later)...user central takes an average of 15-20 seconds to load and the narcissism calculation takes ~80% of that.

We're going to try to nail these down and fix em so hopefully the experience can improve for all!

Mixtape Collective Forums!
8/07/06 11:10pm
So, it took a little longer than expected because my schedule has been pretty hectic, but the forums are here. Eric and I did most of the work in the past two hours. Needless to say, it hasn't been heavily tested, but it also isn't terribly complex, so hopefully bugs are minimal.

We hope you enjoy it. This site has been begging for a forum for quite some time.

With that said, this also is one of the last major features we will be adding for awhile.

Our next task is to redesign the entire site from the ground-up. Yeah, we've been talking about this for awhile, but now we are actually going to do it. The only downside to this is that you guys will have to keep yourselves entertained for awhile, but we'll be sure to toss in new badges, contests and maybe a few surprises here and there.

From our initial discussions, the redesign is going to be pretty incredible. Not only will there be new mixtaping features and a slicker interface, but we are going to really tackle the inefficiencies that are existent now. Gone will be the 10-15 second load times on artist/album/track pages (Sadly, no those load times aren't due to our server...it's due to crappy code :D).

Anyway, enjoy the forum and keep making mixes!


Referral Contest II Results
By eric
8/06/06 09:33pm
I'd like to give a big round of applause (and badges [and +150 points]) to the three winners of this round of the 'referral riot' contest that we've been running. A lot of you brought in some fresh blood, but three people went above-and-beyond. So, without delay, join me in giving the following folks a gigantic 'Yay!'

First: chimp_and_zee
Second: mila
Third: derhay

+5, y'all, +5.

Mid-contest update.
By eric
8/03/06 09:36pm
We have 15 mixes in the contest with just under a week to go. If you're planning on getting your mix in before the deadline, you'd better get your mixtape on.

Also, if you haven't, go vote for all the radass mixes. Follow the 'contests' link on the left.

Penultimately, if you have any good ideas for future mixtaping contests, let coreysprague or I know.

Finally, exclusive badges to the first 4 people who reply with the word 'Yay!'.

Mixtape Contest 1!
By eric
7/26/06 11:33pm
Corey and I finally got our act together and created the very first MTC mixtape contest -- browse over to the contest page and check it out.

Winners get a whopping 200 points AND a custom badge. Hot stuff.

Happy mixtaping.

Forum Ideas
7/26/06 07:06am
Alright, so I started work on the forum. It will be a little while before it is ready to go, but I wanted to get your opinion on something.

Would you guys rather have a simple straightforward forum (nothing fancy), that could be expanded on over time?

Or do you want a fancy full-featured forum from the get go?

I am leaning towards the former, only because we can get a working forum on the site sooner that you can all use.

Anyway, give me some feedback...also if you have ideas for features you'd love to see, lemme know and I'll maybe put them on my list.

Crosstalk and more.
By eric
7/25/06 10:50pm
I've spent the last couple hours putting in a neat little feature that's been on my shortlist for some time: crosstalk.

Basically, on all profile tagboards, you will notice a cute little icon under the tag poster's featured badge. Clicking this will fetch a page with all the tags from both users, making cross-tagboard conversations easier to follow.

As always, badges for people who find bugs.

Finally, we broke 200 users a day or so ago -- awesome. This place is not only a fun outlet for me to practice my coding / mixtaping skills, it's also turning into a pretty rad community of people.

So, to close -- keep spreading the word and making mixes and we'll keep working to bring you the best Collective we possibly can.

ps: thanks to all those who wished me a happy birthday!

User Central
By eric
7/18/06 08:14pm
In lieu of the server outage last night, I was able to get some development work done. I now present to you: User Central, located in the 'main' box in the left column -- It's a fun overview of user profiles.

Things have been slow on the developers' side, but it's starting to ramp up. Keep an eye out for some new goodies.

Also, it's my birthday on monday (7/24). Just so you know.

Major outage
By eric
7/17/06 11:45pm
If you didn't notive, we had a massive service outage today. It wasn't out fault. As I am told, our host had a series of unfortunate events, resulting in the Collective being down for a large part of the day.

Sorry guys. I was just as bummed.

Some new additions
7/16/06 08:35pm
Not a whole lot to report. Life has been busy. I just got engaged on Friday (to my friends, don't feel bad if you don't know, I've been too busy/lazy to tell anyone) and started a new job a few weeks ago, so MC time has been slow.

Anyway, I answered some of your requests made in the last post. There is now a tagboard on the badges pages now so you can engage in discussion about your favorite badges and whatnot.

I also updated the user point breakdown to include the # of artists, albums, and tracks rated and the number of points earned from these ratings.

Finally, I tossed up subpages off of the profile page that show all of the profile and mixtape ratings a particular user has given. Some of you might be excited to see the scores particular people have given your mixes. When I have a chance, I'd like to add a rating breakdown for individual mixes as well.

Anyway, I know it's not much, but it's a start. Some of the other requests are a little more time consuming. Ideas such as the customizable profiles might require a lot more work than it would seem.

Also, bug finders from 2 posts ago, don't worry, you aren't forgotten, we've just been too busy to make a badge yet!



Quick update
By eric
7/12/06 10:47pm
Corey and I met up earlier this week and made a laundry list of bugfixes to jump on and features that we want to implement. If any of you have suggestions, let us know.

Rock on y'all, we're just getting started.