A Blog for Next Small Things

UPDATE (3/14/07): We updated our site so your blog page and band page should be showing background images for any new layouts created. Try it out!

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Looks like MySpace hired a new ambitious engineer! (ooops sorry for the cynical tone :D) Well, it seems like they are working hard to change some stuff that is messing up some of our layouts.

There were couple of changes:

1) They are converting all the single quotes (’) into an unicode character ’ for all the band profile pages and the regular blog pages.

So instead of a rule

background-image:url('http://somesite.com/image.gif');

It’s changing to

background-image:url(’http://somesite.com/image.gif’);

This prevents the rule to be read correctly and will basically ignore the rule and stop any images to show up correctly. How annoying!

It’s a bit a pain to fix it yourself so I would recommend inserting the layout again when we update our site’s code. Will announce on this blog whenever we are updated.

2) They are stripping out any non standard html tags

In order for users to easily change layouts, we had all our layout codes enclosed in a tag <coolchaser>. OK so this isn’t a valid html tag, but by enclosing in it, we were able to immediately recognize our code so we won’t delete any other tweak codes you might have had in your profile.

Anyway, last Saturday or so MySpace started stripping out all those non standard tags and made it into “…”

So, if you inserted your layout sometime around March 8 to 10th or so, changing your Coolchaser layout to a new one might have not worked.

This has been fixed on our site already. So if you find the layout replacement not working, manually delete the code, and try our site again to insert a new layout. Once you do that, the automatic update for any new layout from our site should work like before.

3) They are sooooooo slooooooooooowwww

OK, this is not a MySpace change perhaps, but MySpace has been painfully slooooooooowwwww lately. I mean we are sometimes slow because of so many traffic and since they have 100 times more traffic than us, it must be hard to have a fast and efficient site. Anyway, the sad thing is, when MySpace is slow, we become slow too

When myspace is slow, and we have lots of layout inserts waiting, and then when MySpace suddenly become fast again, we get slammed, and in the past few weeks, our servers couldn’t cope with that slamming and became even slower for up to a few hours after MySpace has recovered.

This might have resulted an error to show on our site such as “oops we messed up!” or simply the page doesn’t load to a new page and get stuck there for 6 hours (I get emails from people saying I waited for 5 hours or so, sorry about that!)

So we are going to have a “time out” thing soon, which is when we recognize the layout isn’t getting inserted, we will just switch automatically to show codes. I know, it’s a pain to manually copy that code, go to your profile, erase the existing code, and paste the new one, but at least I think people will feel like they are in control of the situation. Will also announce when this is implemented!

Phew! So that’s all for now, but will let you know when something like this happens again! Thanks again for trying us and for your loyalty! xoxoxox