Fluff Friends 2009 Easter Egg Hunt

This year, (fluff)Friends introduced new types of eggs into the game. The new eggs ranged from empty eggs, half eggs (either the top or bottom half) and sometimes full eggs with something special in them. I’ve seen a couple of rare eggs and also the excellent rotten egg.

Instead of a little fence, the eggs are hiding under some flowers or bushes. Like last year, the game gets harder as you go on and it does seem daunting to click for hours at a time.

If you want to find last minute eggs quickly, check out the Fluff Grabber, the largest fluff friends petting zoo, with over 240 thousand (fluff)Books. You’ll never get a duplicate when you use it, well, unless you click 240 thousand times of course.

Plus, secretly, I have been working on Fluff Grabber updates again. It’s getting a subtle make-over this. Look for the changes in an upcoming post.

Have a great Easter (or weekend otherwise), everyone!

Of course, it hasn’t been smooth sailing either. The crawler, the part of the system that makes the super-zoo grow by itself, isn’t healthy right now. I’m not sure exactly what happened to it, but here’s the explanation I have. It seems that the response time of (fluff)Friends on Facebook (they’re both slow, but together the effect is compounded) is much larger than the time-out-time that the system uses to fetch pages. So basically, the (fluff)Book takes 16 seconds to respond but the crawler times-out at about 9-10 seconds. Again, I don’t know if it’s the problem. I had added some debugging information to the crawler-ajax thread on the browse page. It only comes up when there is clearly an issue, which is just about all the time at this point.

How about fixing it? I’ll see if I can make the time-out-time longer, maybe to 20 seconds, but after that, if (fluff)Friends and Facebook themselves don’t get a bit speedier to respond, I’m not sure what’ll happen to the crawler.

Hope you guy’s have a good time fluffing with the Fluff Grabber!

mooWalkthrough

My ideas have focus on how I’ve worded various pages of the walkthrough. For instance, on the domready page, there is so much text,

There are down sides to that method. First of all, you have to wait for all images. Next, what if you had a few scripts that had some code tied to window.onload? They would overwrite each other. There are other solutions, which copy the old function from window.onload and add it plus the scripts function back, yet that isn’t exactly elegant.

As mentioned, MooTools comes with a custom event that fires as soon as the DOM is ready. It is called DomReady.

I’m pretty sure I can summarize that chuck of text in much less text. For instance, the above chunk becomes,

Don’t wait for external content using window.onload but rather interact with the page as soon as the DOM is ready to go. Use DomReady.

Isn’t that better? It’s certainly much more direct. I understand that some things are omitted from the chunk’s summery but more or less this type of compression will help everyone.

This concise form will enable me to write the walkthrough faster but also allow, I hope, some people gain more understanding of mootools.

The PHP Executer is a tiny little PHP script that runs your PHP code. Simply type your code into the textarea and when ready, hit execute and you’ll get your code executed.

Your code is not put into an eval statement. Why? Because, if your code does contain an error, eval will hide where your error is. It’ll simply say error was found in eval’d code. Useless. No, the PHP Executer will do something smarter and rely on the true php interpreter.

The PHP Executer writes a text file with your code wrapped inside of the PHP brackets. Then, it saves the file as a PHP file. After that, you’re redirected to your brand new page of PHP code. It runs and if there are errors, they are true errors that tell you where and what they are.

PHP Executer Preview

The PHP Executer offers just a few features, but it’s better than other PHP Executers I’ve seen. Mine offers the following.

• No eval. Pure PHP execution.
• There are two frames so your code and your executed code is always side by side.
• Keeps track of recent (as in current session) executions.
• Files are named from a base 32 sha1 of the code you type. The problem is that it makes the file names really long but guarantees that files are never overwritten.
• Files are purged (to save space and cut clutter) from the system by default every seven days.
• Things are only deleted when you use the executer but not before, so you can save stuff easily.
• No need to wrap code in PHP tags. It does it for you. (No raw HTML in this version, sorry!)
• Safe enough. It uses a session based password-login system. You cannot use it without giving it a new password. Don’t leave it on a production server.

Some day, some extra or more refined features could be better.

• Better naming. It’s really hard to pin down a file you want after you make it the current way.
• Real history, not strictly session based.
• Maybe validating HTML? It’s not the most important thing but I feel there is a standard to uphold.
• Better interface? It’s pretty basic as it is. I think that by adding features, it’ll become more advanced.

Hope someone can find some use for it, please a leave a comment if you try it out.

Since I made ifupdown back in 2007, it’s needed a logo. This year in fact, did I even attempt to make a homepage. It’s orange and pretty simplistic. It’s not something a person looks at with much enthusiasm. I certainly don’t. I’ve had no concepts for branding, really, since I have so little ability for design oriented work. Well, that was until recently.

Current Ifupdown Logo

After I made the mooWalkthrough last year and additionally the Fluff Grabber this year, I found out that there was a huge need of a brand. For that reason, during the summer, I took away the old 1and1 domain parking page and replaced it with a spruced up homepage. The cheap logo I made was just some text with some silly arrows. Like I would put that on a business card. I also think the colors are also messed up. I think the colors for the WordPress Admin center are better than orange. Honestly, I only picked orange because I didn’t want more blue. (Or dark colors.) I support black text. I see all sorts of blogs with black as the background and white (or a light equivalent) text color. It’s hard on the eyes. People coming from Google have adjust to read the blog if it’s black on white. (The new theme has a dark blue background, but the background where all the text is white.)

Ifupdown Logo Prototype 4 min

The logo I was attempting today was a more of a symbol. I’m not sure what designers call it but, it was a shape. What I had planned was an up and a down arrow without shafts. The right side of the up arrow would half merged with the left side of the down arrow. Visually, it makes the up and down words make sense, but the if is still left out. I’m not sure how to visualize ifupdown. I really have no idea. You can get an idea of how this looks with this svg image or by looking to the right. Prototype Ifupdown 4 min

I’m going to try again sometime, but it won’t be for a while. Does anyone have any ideas on what I could do? I’d really like to make the logo myself and I’m willing to learn in order to do it.

Javascript

The javascript bugs in the fluff grabber didn’t stop anyone from using the system. However they did annoy me and bog down the server. Here’s what happens. Before the update, when the crawler (the thing that automatically goes out and looks for new fluff books) had an error while crawling, either a timeout or Facebook error, it would often continue to process even though the system was too unstable for it. That was a problem because needless requests were being sent out and bandwidth was being used. That was a big problem and it was all because of a tiny javascript error in the crawler call back controller.

Back end/PHP

The backend had a problem too. Whenever there was an error, I didn’t know about it until there was something really odd happening with the stat numbers. I don’t like to do live debugging and I rarely get a chance to do it at home. So I added a bit of logic that if the branch of unknown (if something the system can’t handle happens) it’ll send down a parse report in json. It’s pretty neat. Also, the Curl system that was used to fetch the remote facebook/fluff friend pages has been updated too. It now randomizes the user agent and the referrer, which makes it harder for people to get mad at me.

Referrers

I added a referrer catcher in the summer update. Since then, there has been about 370 unique (and just about everything makes it unique) referrer to the fluff grabber main-page. Most of clicks are coming from the fluff friend’s forum.

Stats

Since the summer update of 2008 (oh, rhyme!), there has been an explosion of fluff grabber growth. I’m not sure of the exact number of fluff books we had indexed then, but at this point we have about 232,000 fluff books in the database. Can you believe it? There is also about 1000 or so fluff books added daily when there isn’t much activity via the crawler. We’ve also surpassed the 10,000 removed mark which is great. It’s sad to see fluff friends leave but it’s good to keep the database clean of bad books. Currently, we’re around 1,502,780 clicks and that’s about 7,513,900 munny. It’s an unbelievable amount.

Competition

Fluff friends finally started their own super zoo. Of course, it’s slightly less friendly and much slower than the fluff grabber. It’s organized by newest fluffs, neglected fluffs and I believe famous fluffs. It’s slow too, since it’s on facebook. YSlow claims it took about 29 seconds for that page to load. YSlow claims too, that it took about 5 seconds to load the fluff grabber browse page. Big difference?

The Future

I want to make some improvements to the load and feel, I always do. It’s hard to change though because I suck at design and graphics. I’d like to add a static list for the system. Every single fluff book would be listed on a paginated list that went on forever. Google would probably like that. I want a new fluff grabblet. The current one can’t keep track of it’s users. I’d like to add a sessioning system addition that would also keep track of how many clicks a specific user starts. I’m not sure how to keep users separate though.

Conclusion

The fall update isn’t a large update but it is important in the ongoing evolution of the fluff grabber system. If you have any questions, comments or concerns, please, leave a comment on this post.. I’ll try to get back to you as soon as I possibly can.

The first clear part of War is there there is simple comparison. Basically, player1 and player2 have cards and you compare them. Then, whoever has the higher card, gets the other player’s card. Looking at that in a different way though, once those cards are turned face-up (since in War, the deck is face down), neither of the cards belong to the deck’s of their respective players. In other words, you’ve created a new deck with a special layout: side by side. This might be a bit confusion, however it makes sense to not call the cards once played belonging to someone because a player will get both cards. We’ll say that one player gets both cards now, since that makes more sense and you’ll see why additionally in a moment in terms of war.

The second clear part of War is War. In war, you submit your first three cards on the deck to be offered up and then a fourth card so you can see who wins all of the cards. The three cards each player puts up are really no one’s cards, because while they are face down, it hardly matter’s whose cards they were originally. In this way, they’re put into what is called a winners deck. Along with the three cards from each player in a war, the two original trick cards as well as the war deciding trick cards are put into the winners deck. You don’t actually have a stack of cards those, the separate deck is a simple way of grouping cards that may switch decks.

The complicated part of war to program is that it may happen again because of the war. Double wars and triple wars aren’t uncommon so they have to be accounted for. So, you have to use a special structure called a do-while loop, at least, in java they provide it. In PHP, you’d have to do this another way however, the idea of this is to do the war once and then continue doing wars if need be, but exit the loop otherwise. This solution is elegant and it uses a native structure supported by Java.

So in this post, we’ve established that you need to group any cards that may switch decks as non-owned cards once outside of the deck. Additionally, wars are annoying because more wars can happen after them.

Hopefully, the next post will have some code with it.

Fluff Friend

There are a number of ways for you get more goodies, of course. Whenever you click Knock!, you’ll get somewhere between three and nine people as choices to pet. There is of course, the Fluff Friends internal Zoo, but it’s not really that good since you can’t open many at a time and it’s on facebook so it’s naturally slow. I suggest the (fluff)Grabber!

The (fluff)Grabber was made for this kind of game. There is currently over 1,700,000 (fluff)Books in the system and that grows daily by about 500. The system is also very active; today’s peak alone was about 200,000 clicks!

Happy Trick or Treating, everyone.

Unopened Treasure Chest

empty treasure chest notice or you’ll get one of the three follow scenarios.

1. You simply get the treasure.
2. You must feed the (fluff)Friend on the page.
3. You must send a gift to the (fluff)Friend on the page.

The game is really simple. Here’s why I’m actually blogging about this.

Yesterday, I found out that the traffic to the (fluff)Grabber jumped from about 35 users per day to nearly 90. The today’s total clicks stats were listed at nearly 35,000 which is gigantic for clicks in the last 24 hours. I believe the treasure hunt made this increase of users and clicks. I’ll provide some tips below.

• The (fluff)Grabber is a super-zoo, it is huge, nearly 86,000 (fluff)Books, so don’t expect to petted regularly from it.
• The intention of the (fluff)Grabber is a place where you can pet more people than any other zoo.
• It’s pretty fast. The Open 3, 5 and 10 buttons allows you open many (fluff)Books at once. I recommend that you use Open 5.
• Treasure hunting with the (fluff)Grabber is easy! Since there are so many (fluff)Books, there is a much greater possibility that you’ll find a page with a treasure.

Hurry and find your treasure!

• Modified Design – The design is now cleaner. Things are easier to read. Everything looks cleaner and much more finished.
• Totally rewritten – All of the general text has been reworded to make sure everyone understands exactly what’s going on and hopefully to get some good SEO perks.
• Better Stats – The old system had some stats in the upper right corner with little or no explanation. There is now a new stats page, which can be found in the footer.
• Updated Browse Page – The place where everyone goes! It’s better than ever. There are even sub-points in this one.
  1. Cleaner Tool Sidebar – The old tool bar was pretty messy. It’s now cleaner and much easier to ignore.
  2. New “Add a (fluff)Book” – A thing I didn’t add the first time around, a fluff book adder. Many people want to do this themselves. They all have the chance to get into the largest Zoo ever!
  3. New “Feedback Form” – Getting feedback started this big upgrade. This new form allows all of the great people who use the (fluff)Grabber to get in touch with me.
  4. Special Consideration – A way of saying thank you to all of those who stay active on (fluff)Friends. User’s who have recently interacted with their own (fluff)Friend get a highlighted box around their (fluff)Book ID in the (fluff)Book list.
  5. New Open X Buttons – Maybe opening five links was just too much at once. How about 3? Maybe five wasn’t enough? How about 10 at once? Go for it!
  6. Speedier – Everything is speedier about the browse page.
• (fluff)Grablet – Formerly known as the (fluff)Grabber Bookmarklet, renamed to the (fluff)Grablet! It has had an overhaul too! It’s smaller than it was before. It can do more too.
  1. Smaller Code – The code is a bit smaller. It might not make a difference at first. However, at 3.39KB per request, it adds up!
  2. Smaller Image Tracker – This is technical, unless you understand sending data to servers via an image tag, skip this one. Basically, the old images were 850 bytes. Now they’re 35. I think that’s a 411 percent (411%) savings! So if you had 30 links on a page before, you’d request about 25KB of data, now you request about 1.02KB of data for those same 30 links!
  3. New Color – There was Red (already in system) and Green (just added), now there is Yellow! It’s when I set the origin to a fluff(Book).
• Crawler – Honestly, this was the most challenging and interesting to work on. Basically, if you know anything about search engines, you’ll understand the Crawler. Every 30 days, it’ll go out and look at all un-deleted  (fluff)Books in the system. If they become removed at that time, they’re deleted from the system then. If not though, the cool stuff happens! The crawler will look on the pages for (fluff)Book links. Just like the (fluff)Grablet, it’ll add un-added books to the system and leave out those that are already in. It even looks for origins. Of course, this is all automated too.

Well, there you have it, the summery of the new (fluff)Grabber! Please, visit the largest super-zoo today! Leave some feedback!