PAX wasn't the only reason for an empty office last week. While Jeff and the gang headed to Boston (I did end up buying a lot of beers btw) Andy and the engineering team spent the week in Atlanta for PyCon. We've recently started a small team in Prague, Czech Republic led by Honza Král. They're primarily working on our backend infrastructure, making the sites faster and have a higher uptime. This was the first week all the engineers have been under the same roof (or sang karaoke) together. I figured now would be a good time to give our community an update on what we've been up to the last few months. 
 

Distillery

 
About a month ago we switched most of our internal staff tools to a unified platform we've internally dubbed Distillery. We now have a central, site-agnostic toolset that we use to publish articles, quests, videos and promo content on the sites. Traditionally we've spent little time on staff tools since our editorial friends using these tools are right beside us. They let us know about the bugs, but we subdue them with a beer in favor of improving user-facing products. After three years, it's finally time to clean house and make something a bit more professional. Our end-goal is to make the world's best publishing platform for the management of structured data, social-from-the-start websites. 
  

Rubix

One of the fundamental problems we have as a company is trying to tell people what makes our sites different. For anyone that has never hit an edit button, you might confuse our sites for being yet another blog network. So after an inspirational Django-Dash code sprint last year (We placed second... grr) we decided to build an internal analytics platform to showcase the sheer amount of data that goes through our sites. While the rest of the web tends to be pageview centric, we care more about what content our users are actually contributing and not what logged-out users are consuming. Not only does it let us pinpoint our best users, but we now know how far people make it through long-form videos, how many API requests we get every day, what data those consumers are most interested in, and a plethora of other stats. Here's some quick stats: 
 

• We had 5 million API requests in February.
• In February 718 Wiki tasks were closed by users.
• Comic Vine had over 40,000 wiki submissions alone in February.
• This year, Giant Bomb's Catherine Quick Look is our most watched video.
• User The Dark Huntress is Whiskey Media's top commenter this year.
• Our users comment on other users' blog posts more than on videos or articles. 

A New WYSIWYG Editor

 
Mike Horn is currently at work building a new WYSIWYG editor called Parchment. After years of hacking on top of existing editors we decided this time to start from scratch and make an open-source one that can be contributed to from others outside of Whiskey Media. Hopefully this will mean better support across different browsers. We're building a plugin-architecture that we can use to improve things like image galleries, lists, photo uploads and off-site embeds. In general we want to be smarter about cleaning existing code that users paste into the editor. From a designer's standpoint, I'll finally be able to know that all the images, paragraphs and links don't have weird padding issues. We're also adding some more polish to the user interface and have some clever ideas for automatic link generation and table creation. It's a work in progress, but we'll update the blog later with a github repository if you'd like to help contribute or just check out Mike's awesome codes. 
 

Hulu, Amazon and iTunes on Screened

 
Ethan's been working on Screened to get Hulu, Amazon and iTunes episode links tied to our TV show pages. Screened continues to grow its database at an insane rate. At this pace, we'll soon have more TV and movie data than we do game or comic book data. If you're looking to help out, simply add a link to a Hulu or Amazon on any of our show pages and our furious robots will match up the correct episodes. 
  
Andy's also working on the Netflix integration to make it more stable and add new features. Look for more notes on that soon. 
 

Improvements in Design

 
Alexis has begun a deep dive into our core design practices. After his restyle of the livestream chat I'm really excited to see what other parts of my initial designs he can refresh. He currently has a new header treatment for Giant Bomb and Comic Vine that should remove a lot of the pixel hunting and frustration people have with our current navigation structure. Over the coming months we'll be going through and improving sections of the sites in a similar way with the goal of simplifying and improving existing features before rushing head on into new ones. Expect changes to our wiki, image and list systems.