steam250

November update

Published: December 8th 2020, 6:16:45 pm

Most of November was spent fixing backend issues, which won't be very interesting to most of our readers, so I'll keep this paragraph brief. We're exhausting our daily IOPS on the database backend, so the site will run very slowly in the early hours of the morning (UTC). We've tried to alleviate this by introducing caching, but only 1-2% of page views are cache hits with a two-hour lifetime. We can either solve this issue by throwing more money at it to buy more IOPS or by spending time optimizing the workload, but that also means a longer wait for new features since I can only work on one thing at once.

We did manage to squeak in one little feature though: random games!

This probably has limited appeal but I found a way to implement it quickly so threw it in. Randomly picking out games will quickly help you start to realize things that are not interesting about certain games that it picks out, which in turn will help you build an idea of the things you are interested in, which will be really useful when we roll out the advanced search which is our next big feature -- hopefully by the end of this year, provided the aforementioned problems don't get in the way too much!

Some of you may have noticed the random game feature appears in a brand new column, which is the focus of this post's banner graphic. We've received some feedback about how poorly our Club 250 layout scales on on smaller screens and it's about time we fixed that. The header graphic shows how the new 3-column layout changes as the screen shrinks through three iterations (there's actually a more than three in practice). On the largest desktop screens we show all three columns side-by-side, then collapse into two columns and eventually all the way down to a single column on vertical mobile devices. This new layout should go live later this week.

This new column will be home to a bunch of new features, such as:

• More games from the same developer
• More games from the same publisher
• Related games (e.g. parent game where applicable) and DLC
• Game recommendations based on the current game

Thank you to everyone who continues to support our work and everyone, past and present, who has contributed to the Steam 250 and Club 250 projects via Patreon. It is thanks to your support that we continue! Merry Christmas and I'll see you all in 2021.