How do you rework a staple of ESPN.com? Simple, give the fans what they want. Continuous improvement, deliver data to fans faster and create a flexible platform. These core elements were the focus of the redesigned front page and interior scoreboards.
Page One Scoreboard Features:
Auto Updating: Previously only when the page would refresh would the scoreboard data reload. With the new version the score and clock stream in as the data is available.
One click access to most relevant game links: In the three major game states, pre, in, and post the most relevant game links are available with a simple hover action.
Personalized: If you have a favorite team selected via personalization corner that team’s game will move to the front of the list of game modules and highlight yellow.
Show the most number of games possible: It was critical to provide a view that allowed the most number of games visible at any time.
Special Event Treatment: As you saw this weekend we have greater flexibility to provide a way to message our fans on sport holidays.
Back-end feed aggregator: Remember those auto updating scores? A new feed aggregation mechanism allows us to combine multiple sport feeds into one allowing up-to-date score data within any sport tab you select.
Interior Scoreboard Features:
Update faster: With a change in architecture all new redesigned scoreboards received, on average, a 20% improvement in the time to deliver data to the fan from when we receive it.
Scoreboard Calendar: A new calendar showing clearly what day you are on, how many games occur on that day, and simple navigation to move to past or future weeks.
Key dates: One of the most requested features was a clear view of special events within the season, now reflected in the key dates area and denoted by a highlighted red style within the week calendar.
More Scoreboards: Another staple form scoreboards past that was brought back based on fan feedback, the ability to switch to other scoreboards easily.
Consolidated tools: The scoreboard tools allows us to feature all the other utilities throughout the site related to the current scoreboard in view.
Team Logos: On non-college scoreboards team logos were added to allow the fan to quickly spot the team they are looking for. Logos coming to college sports soon.
Personalized: If you have a favorite team selected via personalization corner that team’s game will move to the top of the list of game modules and highlight yellow.
Continuous improvement: The flexible design and change in front end architecture allows for more flexibility as fans needs change and additional features are developed.
Features:
Two huge new features were announced today for EC2. The first being Elastic IPs which is basically the static IP solution everyone has been waiting for, but better! Elastic IP is a 1:1 NAT solution. What is so cool about this is you can dynamically remap your static IP to different running instances creating a poor mans HA solution. The second feature is Availability Zones. This allows you to launch instances in isolated zones that amazon describes as “distinct locations engineered to be insulated from failures in other zones.” The next step to this is allowing for region specific selection as well, currently you are limited to selecting a zone within your defined region based on your account. This provides for a huge increase in availability and will certainly make organizations take another hard look at what amazon has to offer to extend or augment their existing facilities.
How can you know when something is about to go wrong if you can’t see it?? We finally closed the loop today on some MSSQL trending we have been missing for a very long time. Being able to watch things like table scans/sec, batch reads & writes/sec, and transactions/sec is huge during an event. As much as we drill into folks heads the importance of communicating changes, it is still to easy for a simple change to have unexpected impact on something like a DB. As I noted the other day it is almost always the DB or the file system and while we have our share of issues that aren’t many times, we have chased our tail due to lack of trending on the DB a lot and in the end it has been something stupid like an index got dropped.
That is a loose quote from a SXSW panel on scalable web ventures. This just hits way to close to home today to not write about. In our case it was both the DB and the File System. We were doing some last minute load testing, you can never be too sure, and after almost the entire day and roping in two other teams to dig into the db and SAN we realized the db had not been setup right. All files associated with the specific database were on the same storage LUN. This caused us a 95% reduction in throughput of our service. Splitting up the t-logs, data files, etc. onto different LUNs got us back to where we expected. The bottom line is we wouldn’t even have noticed this with out trending everything possible in cacti on our hosts and while win2k3 disk trending has some hurdles for SAN attached disk, it still pointed us in the right direction.
In between avoiding any real specifics in an