Just a little update about Powncified. It’s been going quite well, not required too much maintenance and received a little attention courtesy of a pownce note from Daniel Burka. Thanks Daniel. It also briefly featured on the video podcast Epic-Fu presented by the lovely Zadi Diaz. You can add Powncified as a friend on Pownce to receive (almost) daily updates of what’s hot on Pownce. They are not as regular as I’d like as sometimes real life gets in the way and until the Pownce API provides a method for posting notes automatically I’ll be doing them by hand.
I managed to add some new features since my last post and fix a few bugs. The major difference, which proved far easier to implement (read hack) than expected was the addition of embedded media for certain types of links into the Powncified page. I like to write a post detailing the parsing of Youtube links and embedding of the video later this week. Currently Youtube videos and regular image files (.jpg, .png, .gif and .bmp) are supported but I’m keen to support embedding Flickr images next and I’ll be keeping an eye out on what other media sites frequently feature on the front page. Also, as promised, you can view the notes that people have posted for each link by clicking “Who Pownced this?”. Additionally the latest note for the most popular link is shown on the front page. My current concern with this is how much data is being transferred on my server. Each time someone views a page my site goes to retrieves every note from the Pownce API. This isn’t a big deal at the moment as I’m not receiving much traffic but it is totally redundant.
I’ve fixed a number of bugs, mostly to do with the CSS layout of the page. I’ve learnt the hard way that I need to keep a local version of the site on my machine and fix and test there before uploading the fix. I hope no-one’s been using the site whilst I’ve been developing and seen crazy colours, layout issues and PHP warnings sporadically appear. I’ve got out of that habit now I promise. Apart from that the site’s been relatively stable. In fact I think the most pressing issues were caused by problems with the Pownce API itself. Unfortunately there was not much I could do about that except handle them gracefully. And of course Leah is always impressively quick to fix these things if you report them.
If you notice any more bugs (I’m sure there are plenty), have ideas for new features, enhancements to the design of the page or other media that should be included feel free to add them to this post’s comment thread, message Powncified on Pownce or send them to powncified@googlemail.com.
