Well, that fateful time of year comes along again- thousands of EVE Online players meet for fanfest in Reykjavik, Iceland. And I can never make it. This year, my studies conspired against me; except they didn’t. While unknown until hours beforehand, I actually had no work and a lecture on basic packet switching keeping me in England. Doh.
Anyway. We got a lot of fluff, this year. Aside from further elaboration on stuff already announced, there were actually no major announcements made at fanfest. We did have some interesting info about New Eden, CCP’s EVE-Online-Online website. And there was some evidence (gasp!) that CCP were listening to third party developer suggestions at the API roundtable.
There was almost enough minor stuff announced to make it worthwhile. We did get a release date for Dominion – 1st December 2009. But no New Eden with the launch. And knowing CCP we’ll probably not get API changes till a bit after that. What’s really awesome though is that we will be getting new APIs. I’m just hoping they’re useful APIs…
Anyway, while I was sitting at home being mostly bored, I decided I’d had enough pressing F5 on the Twitter search page, and put together a website (ff.mmmetrics.co.uk – it’s down now) to grab EVE fanfest feeds from Twitter and Flickr. This became popular enough within a few hours that we had to rip it off the server and give it it’s own Amazon EC2 virtual server, as it was in danger of crashing ISKsense and EVE Metrics. Doh. A wild success, in any case, for a simple but handy website. What the website did make us realise is how little headroom we have on our current server. We kinda knew that already but it did make the point quite well.
EVE Metrics 2.1 has launched mostly well but we’re still having issues with the API processing code. Makurid has been working hard to pin down the cause of the problems and destroy it while I’ve been fixing up servers and moving sites around, and we’re getting a bit closer to having a complete fix. We’re not there yet, but we will be soon with any luck.
Thanks for the FF site – it was very useful even for those of us lucky enough to be in Reykjavik this weekend!
Thanks for the site James,
very quickly put together. Have to say Im excited about Dominium, less excited about Dust (but it doesn’t bother me as much) , and INCARNA seems cooler than last time we heard about it.
Thanks for the website, it was good to stay informed
I greatly enjoyed the web site (capacity and stability issues aside :p ) and it does sort of inspire me for a similar mini-site.
Too many projects, too little time…
I actually decided to go with an entirely new web framework, Ramaze, instead of my usual Rails framework of choice. As a result some of the problems were teething issues from the first Ramaze site I’ve deployed.
As far as capacity goes; we’re kinda out of capacity on the server now. We had to use Amazon EC2 just to stop everything else crashing but it’s an expensive solution. This was a one-off for a few days so I can afford it but we can’t afford to run off it on a monthly basis!
This has given me a few other ideas I might some day implement. We’ll see