The request system has been the subject of much tweaking in the recent weeks. After some testing, we’re adding another function to the page. One of the basic problems we’ve had since the system went online is that it accepted requests for themes that already exist. This created two real issues . . . the first is that designers would see these requests and make themes we didn’t need. The other issue is that someone coming to the site hoping to find a theme that we did in fact have would put in a request and leave thinking we didn’t.

By using a bit of the technology already in place in our search feature, we’ve changed the request function to eliminate both of those issues at once. When a request is submitted, the system will check it against our entire database of themes and return any results. If it looks like we already have that theme, it’ll inform the user of the good news and give them a link instead of submitting the request. The system is pretty smart, so it shouldn’t have any problems with slight variations on entries or seeing the difference between a movie theme that exists and a videogame theme of the same name.

Try it out!

Our request page will not only allow you to make a request, but also to see a list of every request currently in the que. With literally thousands of requests, this list was getting very long! We’ve tweaked the list so that only themes with three or more requests are shown on the page. If a theme has one or two requests, it still stays in our que - it just won’t be displayed on the page. This will cut down on database strain, page load time, and some of the 500 errors we’ve been having. This will also act as an automatic filter for improper requests and input mistakes.

Many of you probably noticed that Halo has been at the top of the request list this week, even though there’s already a halo theme! While we were upgrading our code, we seem to have created a bug that changed every input to a request for Halo. Whoops! As a result of this, the Halo (UK) band may have more requests than they should. We’ve removed the halo videogame from the requests list, and emailed everyone who requested it to let them know we’ve fixed the bug.

Things are finally starting to get back to normal. We’ve got a few new themes coming in this week. We’re attempting to fill some of the themes that have been at the top of the request list for the last few months. One Tree Hill went up today, and we should have some others later in the week.

We’ll also be putting up some new gaming themes over the next few days. It’s our way of getting excited about E3. A few of the themes have been requested for quite some time, so look out for those too.

Our experimentation with Google Analytics has been going really well. We’re going to continue tracking the new pages, and if all is still well at the end of the month we’ll be implementing the technology on the rest of the site. We’re looking at adding a new feature later this year, but we’re still unsure if we’ll have it done in time to do this all at once.

Eric and Shannon have relocated their offices to a new city, and are still getting settled in. Designs are still being submitted, and we should have a few new ones up this weekend.

We’re experimenting with Google Analytics to help better track our statistics. We previously used Awstats, but we had to drop it once we switched our servers earlier this year. We haven’t found a good replacement yet, so hopefully this is it! After a week or so we should have a better idea of whether or not we’ll be sticking with it. If we do, we’ll be patching each page with a small bit of code. User performance shouldn’t be affected.

This will allow us to better understand where our users are coming from and how to attract more. Also, we hope to more accurately represent the top eight themes on the main page. Whether we’ll be able to achieve this is yet to be seen.

Set up a page!