About two weeks ago, PB Tracker went live at http://www.pbtracker.net and I was officially the first user to sign up (surprise surprise). New users have been slowly trickling on and feedback about the site sounds positive so far. The site received a huge spike in action yesterday morning and afternoon when duckfist tweeted about PB Tracker. I guess it doesn't hurt to have a popular Mega Man speedrunner speak highly of your web site. At last count, there are 148 runners signed up on PB Tracker and more seem to keep coming every day.

A few bugs have reared their ugly heads since launch. The worst problem I've encountered so far was a bug that blocked new users from submitting runs entirely (oops). Luckily, I was able to fix this one pretty quickly once I was made aware of it. The community has been great helping me out too, quickly letting me know over Twitter when something suspicious happens. I have even had a few volunteer their time to help with development, which is amazing. This finally convinced me yesterday to write some documentation in the code to better facilitate new developers jumping on the open project.

Though I will need to spend more of my time working on other things soon, there are still some matters to attend to. Last post, I mentioned that I wanted to write my own splits program that automatically submits runs to PB Tracker. However, I have changed my stance on this. There are already three good splits programs out there: WSplit, Llanfair and TimeSplitTracker. The community really doesn't need a fourth. Instead, I have been talking with the authors of TimeSplitTracker and allspeedruns.com, and we are working on a protocol for communication between splits programs and run tracking sites like PB Tracker. In a perfect world, we would have an option available to submit to PB Tracker from all three splits programs, but we'll see how close we can get to that goal.

While auto-submission for splits is being sorted out, I have a few more improvements in mind. For me, the primary feature of PB Tracker is the runner pages where anyone can view the personal best times submitted by an individual runner in a nice, tabular format. This provides a convenient page to link to from one's Twitch TV channel, especially with their less-than-popular switch from HTML to Markdown panels for listing channel info. As such, the improvements I want to make to PB Tracker focus on enhancing the runner pages. For example, I'm hoping to allow users to choose which columns of their PB table are visible to viewers so that only information important to the runner is reported. I also want to add some sorting and filtering options for the "view all runs" pages. Currently, all runs are simply listed by date. It would be nice to be able to, for example, list only runs for a certain game or category and to sort runs by, say, run time. I haven't thought much about how to implement these options, but hopefully they are easy enough to include.

Oh hey, it's time for another PB Tracker update. I have lots of cool stuff to talk about, so let's go.

Firstly, PB Tracker has a brand spanking new paint job thanks to me stumbling across Bootswatch's free themes for Bootstrap. I went with the very orange "United" theme that gives the site a very Ubuntu-look. I think it looks sharp. Secondly, browsing the internets for new fonts led me to Font Awesome, a rad set of icons that are also Bootstrap friendly. For the artistically-challenged, like myself, Bootswatch and Font Awesome are a godsend when it comes to web visuals. As you may be able to tell from the screenshots, I basically used Font Awesome icons whenever I possibly could. I tried really hard to find a good use for the lightning bolt icon, but unfortunately the site is currently sans lightning bolt.

I was actually able to spend some time on the visuals because all the basic features of the site are now implemented. Users can now add links to their Twitter, YouTube and Twitch TV accounts. Profile images can also be added through Gravatar. I didn't want to host any additional images, so Gravatar seemed like a good fit here. Furthermore, on runner and game pages, there is now a spot to set the best known time for a given game and category with an optional video link. This feature acts somewhat like a restricted wiki where anyone who has submitted a run for the game can update the corresponding best known times. With any wiki, there's always potential for others to post bogus times, but hopefully the trolls won't make life too miserable. I've thought about putting in better defence mechanisms against this, but I figure I'll just cross that bridge when the time comes.

After I tie up a few loose ends, the site will be ready to launch. If all goes well, I'm hoping to have it up and running sometime next week after Canadian Thanksgiving. I'm sure bugs will crop up once I release the site to the wild, but there's only so much testing one guy can do. Finally, submissions are still a bit clunky and will be one of my top priorities to improve after launch. I'm looking to add the ability to submit by uploading WSplit-style files. After that, I hope to write a splits program as a companion to PB Tracker that allows auto-submissions after every complete run.

A week has passed since I first posted about PB Tracker, so I figure it's time to post an update. I have had at least a few people mention something to me about the site, so it's good to hear that there is some interest in this project.

PB Tracker still looks as grey as ever, but the site is much more functional than it was a week ago. Optional links to videos can now be added to runs. In addition, all runs submitted by a runner can be viewed and the owner of the runs can edit submissions at will. While the colour scheme may still be boring, I've also added appropriate box art to many of the pages. Since I'm wanting a site that at the minimum replicates my old Twitch TV personal best table, box art was mandatory.

Furthermore, there are now game pages that list every runner's personal best time for each run category. I dare say the word "leaderboard" here, but I guess that is kind of what these pages represent. Just to be clear, I am not trying to compete with SRL and their upcoming leaderboard. These game pages are only here for convenience, much like similar pages exist on Congratsio. Runners' times will only appear on these game pages if the runners themselves submit their runs. For this reason, PB Tracker's game pages will be far from an accurate speedrunning leaderboard. I am actually excited to see what the SRL guys come up with as it sounds like they will be implementing a true leaderboard that will list the best run times with video links known for many games.

I still have a number of things on my to-do list before I push the site live. This list includes the ability to delete previous runs, as well as a column that lists a runner's average time for any given game and category. User profiles are also very minimal at the moment. I would like to include links to a runner's Twitter, YouTube, and TwitchTV accounts on their PB page. It would be really cool to add the option to auto-tweet upon submission, but that certainly won't be available from the get-go. We'll see if I ever get to any such fancy features after deployment.

That's all for now. Keep fit and have fun.

A while back, I spent several hours creating an info page for my Twitch TV channel that, among a few other things, tracks my personal best times for all the games I speedrun. It's just a simple, static html page generated from a spreadsheet and a couple dirty scripts. However, it takes a bit of effort to update and I have been meaning to improve the page for some time now. After taking Udacity's Web Development online course, I feel like I have enough tools now to actually build something significantly better.

To that end, I started developing a dynamic web app called "PB Tracker" to make it easier to record and display speedrun times in a simple, tabular format. I have included user signups, so the app will be available for anyone to use that may be interested in tracking their own runs. At first glance, you may notice that the site looks, well, very grey. This is because I have spent zero time on the actual appearance of the site and have only focused on functionality to this point. Also, if you are familiar with some of the other speedrunning sites around, you may also see some similarities here with both Congratsio and the SpeedRunsLive leaderboards plan. In fact, the SRL guys were looking for some coding help, and I didn't volunteer to instead work on this. I feel a little guilty about that, but I feel the goals of PB Tracker are significantly different from Congratsio's and SRL's.

Firstly, though the name of the site may be a bit misleading, the site is built to track all run times, not just PBs. One of the things I enjoy about speedrunning is setting goals and making progress towards those goals. Beating a PB is always a great goal, but sometimes that is a daunting task (at least for me). Instead, I like to think about beating my average time. So, by submiting every run, the site will track both average times and best times. Secondly, one of my stretch goals is to build a new split program that can automatically upload finished run times to PB Tracker, making the recording of times much more seamless. The split program will likely be quite simple and compatible with the WSplit file format. I'm also planning to have splits recorded from other runners be downloadable for anyone to use.

On the tech side of things, I will be deploying the site through Google App Engine at the custom domain pbtracker.net that I just registered this morning. I am developing in Python, using the latest version of Twitter Bootstrap and doing some html templating with jinja2. I am not a web developer by any stretch of the imagination, so I will likely be doing some very foolish things along the way. I don't have a release date planned for PB Tracker just yet, but I do plan to release the site as soon as it is functional, even if all the features are not quite there yet. Stay tuned.