Kilg.us – Fantasy Stat Tracker …Tracker

I jumped into the Find Friends section of Kilg.us this evening, planning to update the logic to auto-accept all friend requests to “Major League Baseball” (at present, I manually check the account daily and accept requests). Hitting the page, though, I encountered a Lucene search error, so that derailed my attention.

It looks like the search logic was getting confused when the page was sent an empty query (just clicking the “Find Friends” link rather than using the form on the Dashboard). This wasn’t happening a month or so ago when I set it up, so I’m guessing it has something to do with the size of the index that is being queried now.

Anyway, I updated the code to handle empty queries more gracefully. While testing that, I noticed an issue when requesting Friends that don’t have a name on their profile. When making the request, the prompt would ask if you wanted to request ” ” to be your friend. That isn’t very helpful. I updated that script to pull in the user’s email address if a name isn’t on the profile. Now when you ask someone to be your friend, you will either be prompted with their name or their email address. Much better.

In the process, my JavaScript errored out a couple times. This, unfortunately, means I requested to be friends with a couple people I don’t know. So if you got a random friend request from me, I won’t be offended if you decline!

Earlier this Spring I changed the search function for finding friends and creating Industries. The biggest change was moving to a system that uses the Lucene search engine. Part of that engine requires that an index be built for the data to be searched. This was my first implementation of Lucene, so I didn’t have experience with maintaining that index of data. As it turns out, each time the data within the database changes, the index needs to be rebuilt to include all the correct information.

Initially, I wrote a short script to build the index. As more and more people signed-up for Kilg.us, though, the data became out of date because it wasn’t automatically re-indexing.

I have updated the processes for creating an account and changing user settings to display information publicly. Both processes now include a step that re-indexes user data. This should ensure that the user index is always up-to-date and all users with their information shared will be findable in the Find Friends search.