Some days I just suck

If you can't tell, my confidence has been at an all time high the past month or so. I really feel like all of my work the past few years has put me in place to do something special with SportsLizard. One could say that my confidence has turned into cockiness (which can be both a good thing and a bad thing).

But it always seems that whenever you're feeling untouchable, something happens to make you feel like you suck. Yesterday was one of those days where I kept catching error after error, bug after bug - all things I should have never missed and yet somehow managed to miss all of them. I should have known better. Anytime you complete a 3 month project in 3 weeks, SOMETHING is going to go wrong. It just so happened that I found all of those somethings at the same time yesterday.

Openads messing with load times
I was boasting about the powerful (and free) Openads ad software last week. I still think it's great, but don't think you should plan on installing it and deploying it in a few days. I am pretty familiar with online advertising, and I'm pretty familiar with PHP/MySQL driven applications, but I still had to read every sentence in the manual to make sure I was doing it correctly. If I had to install it again, it would be cake, but it was frustrating the first time around.

Anyway, last night I had a complaint that pages weren't loading. I opened up Firefox, and all was well. But in IE, it took a LONG time for a page to load (I'm talking 45 seconds of showing just the header). At first I was sure it was my thumbnail script - I'm auto-generating thumbnails from pictures of items scattered across the web (people don't upload a photo, rather provide me with an image URL). The problem was I KNEW that I had tested the site in IE and not had that problem.

After an hour of going insane and wondering if our new server was to blame, I flipped on Firebug and realized that my ad software was the one slowing the load times. Turns out calling two ads at the same time with javascript invocation code (Openads talk) is slooooowwwww. So I changed a few settings around and all was good. I just should have tested the site more thoroughly after installing Openads.

Stupid Mistake
While playing around in IE, I also noticed a really, really, really stupid mistake that was making the ads appear above the items instead of next to them in IE (see an example of the item page to see what I'm referring to). Again, I didn't test the site thoroughly enough after installing the ad software.

SE Spiders Screwing With My Data
Then I noticed that the 'Popular Searches' on the home page were the exact same as when I launched. How could that be? There had been some 1,000 searches already. Was EVERYONE just clicking those links? Well no, not everyone - every bot. Every time a search engine spider crawled those links it was counted as a search, keeping it popular. And at that moment I realized that this data from the old SL was absolute crap because half of the searches were from search spiders crawling links to search results. So much for being "the smartest thing I ever did with SL the first time around". Oh, and the same problem pertained to keeping track of what items people are clicking to buy - search spiders follow the "buy" link and it gets tallied as a purchase.

I solved this two ways - first, I used the rel="nofollow" tag on my links to prevent search spiders (the good ones anyway) from crawling those links. I've already conceded that individual items won't bring search traffic because they are only up for a week or two, so I really don't need the search results to be crawled. Second, I added a field to my database to record the HTTP User Agent, which will tell me if it's a browser or a bot on the page. Google AdSense has a nasty habit of crawling every page that shows AdSense on it...which is fine, but I don't want that to be counted as a search so I'll filter those User Agent's out.

If this data is really going to be used in a price guide, I've got to keep it accurate. These are good first steps, and I'll probably add IP tracking to the mix too to try to prevent human spamming....something I'm sure will happen (if you want your item that you're selling to have a higher value, you could inflate the search demand for it by searching a lot for said item).

My Trunk is a Lake
And to top it off, I was making a late run to FedEx with George and we went to put some boxes into my trunk and there was a few inches of smelly rain water awaiting us. It's leaked before - I've fixed it before - but obviously not good enough. I'm going to take care of that later today.

Days like yesterday can definitely shake your confidence, but they are also great learning experiences. Yesterday slapped me in the face and showed me how much more work I really have to do to make my site great. In the end, it just motivated me more :)