Category Archives: Development

News Feed Update

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So apparently our news feed is very popular. I was surprised when I found out that it accounted for almost 30% of my blog traffic. For some time I’ve been meaning to look into FeedBurner and see if it would be useful for us. Plus I’m a stats whore. Haha, thinking back, I’ve also been recently called a trailers whore too. Never thought about myself that way, but it makes sense.

Anyway, what started out as research at 4am, turned into why don’t I just give it a try. Setting up was a lot simpler than I thought. After logging in using my Google account, I was allowed to immediately add a new feed and select my own feed address: http://feeds.hd-trailers.net/hd-trailers/blog

After setting it up, it provided me options on how to easily point my existing feeds to its service. They even have an awesome WordPress plugin: FeedBurner FeedSmith and setting that up was extremely simple.

It appears now any feed requests will automatically be redirected to FeedBurner, so no updates to your RSS reader should be necessary, unless of course you want to. If anyone is hitting into issues with the new RSS feed, please do let us know in the comments.

Hopefully by offloading the RSS feed to FeedBurner, the rest of the site and blog would perform better. 😀

Down Time

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Many of you may have noticed that our site was down for the majority of yesterday. I’m still not sure what happened, but I was alerted that around 10am, people were getting 500 Internal Server Errors. Somewhere between then and 12pm, people started to get redirected to 127.0.0.1.

I contacted 1and1 (our web hosting provider) and the first tier customer support had no idea what was going on. I knew it was still reaching their servers since pages requiring basic auth still prompted for credentials. But afterwards, it’d still redirect you to 127.0.0.1. They told me they were going to escalate the issue. I inquire what the ETA is to fix and they told me they had no idea. I asked when I should call back if the issue is not resolved. At first they told me 24 hours. Then they say it may take up to 48 hours. I was not pleased with the response, but I guess that’s what you get for cheap hosting.

After 12 hours of down time, I decide to move my site onto DreamHost temporarily. During this move, I made some changes that’ll make my life easier if I decide to port it onto another server. It was a good thing I still had shell access to my 1and1 account. Hurray for rsync for making my life super easy. I was also able to access the databases to get the latest updates since our last backup.

I also took some time to move the blog onto it’s own subdomain. All previous links will still work as they’ll be redirected to http://blog.hd-trailers.net/. If you do see broken links or things not working in general, please do report the issue. Having the blog on a different subdomain served a couple purposes:

  1. It allows us to bypass the WordPress cookie for our main catalog.
  2. It allows us to run each site under a different user.

I apologize for any inconvenience this had cause. Maybe it’s time I get a dedicated server.

New Blog Theme

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I’ve decided to switch to the Lightword theme for the blog. The previous theme I was using was no longer being updated and the amount of customization I had to maintain was starting to get out of hand. I found this theme simple, yet elegant.

I like the fact you can navigate to the next/previous blog posts without having to go back to the index.

This theme also allowed nested replies in the comments/discussion section, which was something I really wanted. Another perk is that this theme brought back the comment section for our tutorial pages, so we no longer have to link to a different blog post for discussion.

If you see something wrong with the layout, please do let us know.

Less Ads, Control Panel, and Other Changes

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I know it’s been awhile since we made any improvement to our site, but life has been busy.

Some of you may have already noticed. Over the past few weeks, we’ve made a bunch of changes to the site. The most noticeable change is probably the removal of a bunch of ads. We’ve also switched from using Project Wonderful to Google Ads. Yes, we’ve switched over to the Evil Empire.

Another change is that our Trailer Library (previously known as All Trailers) when in text mode is displayed in 1 column with no line-wrapping (previously 4 columns). We feel that this design feels neater and much more easier to scroll through to find the movie you want. We’ll probably group them by first letter some time down the road, but for now, this should suffice.

On our individual movie pages, you’ll notice we’ve added 3 new buttons into what we’re calling the control panel. Currently we only have a Play Latest Trailer button, Share on Twitter button, and Share on Facebook button. We have some ideas of what else to add to the control panel later. If you have any ideas, feel free to submit them to the feedback panel by clicking on the feedback on the left.

One additional thing we’ve changed is we now split the trailers from the clips, an often requested change according to our feedback. The trailers and teasers will now show up grouped together followed by the clips grouped together.

We’d like to take this time to thank all our contributors as well as visitors. We appreciate the support you have for us. It would mean a lot to us if you would let your friends know about our site on Twitter, Facebook, or any other way you can think of! 😀

Auto-Detection for Apple Direct Downloads

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Looks like Apple direct downloads are working again if you replace the subdomain. Anyway, I’ve modified our main catalog to automatically switch to using www.apple.com when it detect that direct download is working. When it detects that direct downloads are broken, it’ll switch back to use movies.apple.com and add the yellow alert bar at the top.

As for the blog, I’m going to continue using movies.apple.com. There are plans to add a filter/plugin that’ll automatically switch the subdomain.

Replacing Subdomain Working Again For Apple Trailers

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Thanks to Le Bao Phuc for sending this in. It looks like replacing the subdomain for Apple trailers with www is working again, similar to the fix 2 months ago.

Given that Apple disabled this workaround after about a month, and now it’s starting to work again, I’m not sure now long before they disable it again.

I’ve updated all the Apple trailer URLs back to using www.apple.com (instead of movies.apple.com). Let me know if you encounter any issues.

Apple Links Broken Again

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Apple HD trailer links are broken again. I currently don’t have time to look too deep into the issue, but from a quick analysis, it looks like the domain www.apple.com has blocked out all access movie trailers. You may recall that the solution that bypassed the QuickTime user agent check was to change the domain movies.apple.com to www.apple.com in the url.

The current workaround is back to setting the user agent and using the movies.apple.com domain. For more information about the workaround, please read Direct Download Links from Apple Are Not Working.

Remember in order for the workaround to work, you have to change the domain from www.apple.com to movies.apple.com, if it’s not already correct.

See Update: Replacing Subdomain Working Again For Apple Trailers

RapidShare Mirrors

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I’d like to welcome yyoyoma as the latest member to our team.

He’ll be providing RapidShare mirror links to our blog posts. I’m still currently working on a design to see if I’m able to incorporate it into our main catalog. But for now in our main catalog, you’ll find a new Mirrors link underneath the trailers.

Enjoy!

Database Issues

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Looks like one of our WordPress plugins were generating excessive load on our 1and1 DB. The culprit appears to be Recently Popular, which was doing some sophisticated SQL queries. I’ve since disabled that and switched to WordPress.com Stats Helper, which stores the visitor data on their end.

Let’s hope this resolves the issue and that we’ll be seeing less 500 Internal Server Error. Maybe it’s time to look into dedicated servers or co-location hosting. If so, I’m definitely not going with 1and1 given how unhappy I was on how they dealt with this situation.

I sent the following email to them:

Thanks for clarifying the issue. I’ve disabled the plugin that generates the queries below and hopefully will resolve the issue.

However, there are several questions/expectations I have, which I feel 1and1 could have done a lot better at.

1. The T&C’s are very vague about “excessive load”. Is there a way for me to see what type of load I’m generating and if there is, what defines excessive load? If there isn’t a way, how does a customer even know when he’s generating excessive load?

2. When a customer is putting excessive load on shared resources, I would’ve expected warnings or at minimal a notification that my database was going to be shut down. I found out several hours later my website was no longer able to connect to the database. I then had to call in inquiring about why my database was “closed” and the customer service on the other end was not able to give me a reason because the department in charge of this was closed. I’m extremely unhappy with how this situation was dealt with.

Given this, what’s the next step in restoring the database which you have shut down.

Their reply:

It appeared as if you were using MySQL for logging, so we would suggest not using that. Depending on the severity of the load, we do send out warnings before stopping connectivity, but in your case our System Admins in Germany acted as they did because your database was already affecting our other customers on the server.

I like how their reply hardly answered any of my questions…

Facebook Fan Page – Ideas Needed

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For those who don’t follow us on Twitter or notice the new link at the bottom of our homepage, we’ve started our own Facebook Fan Page. We’re not sure how we plan on using it yet, but welcome any ideas.

Some of the things I’ve been contemplating about include:

  • Features/Requests/Suggestions can be done via the discussion boards
  • You can notify us of new trailers via our wall
  • Posting whenever a really cool trailer is released

Initially I began importing the blog posts via RSS feed, but that really just sort of spammed the fan page. Plus we already have RSS and Twitter for that, and I didn’t want the fan page to become another status update. On Twitter, it’s more about fans communicating with us. On Facebook, fans can now interact with each other, which I think is pretty neat.

Let me hear some ideas! 🙂