Code Jedi Tyler has dropped a few cool new features on the site recently, but aside from that…what are we up to?
We’re doing a fair bit of work on backend tools for our customer support staff: stuff to make it easier to issue refunds, investigate and quickly resolve customer issues, etc.
We’ve also been splitting our time with our other brand: SmartFlix. For better or worse, SmartFlix is our cash cow right now, and we’re doing a bunch of A/B tests over there. For folks who don’t know, A/B testing is when a website has two (or more!) different versions of a feature, or of graphic design, navigation, etc. Half the folks viewing the site see one version, and half see the other…and then, using web server logs, check out ratios, shopping cart size, etc., we figure out which feature is liked better by customers, and then we change the website. It’s a way of rolling out new features and testing to make sure that they’re ACTUALLY useful.
This is a technique that we’re going to be using at HeavyInk pretty soon.
I’ve been working on a lot of administrative stuff (getting taxes done for 2007, setting up a retirement plan for the code ninjas here, etc.), but I’ve also had a bit of time to do some coding recently. Out at Google, there’s a feature called “Google Products” which lets vendors upload descriptions of products, and (a) store these in a global Google-maintained database; (b) have these show up on certain searches. I thought I wrapped it up yesterday, but it turns out that our most recent (attempted) upload of 10,000 products had a character or two that Google didn’t like, so I’ll be back at that soonish.

























Comments
It’s really cool to read about the behind the scenes stuff. It’s easy to just get caught up in the web site and forget about all the hard work that gets put into it.
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