TL;DR

That’s about a 66% increase in speed on the backend, and a 50% increase on the front end.

Here are some things we implemented over the course of the project and a few more details in case you’re curious about what’s changed:

Every person coming to the page for the first time since the cache refreshed (on venue update or at the evening switch) will see whatever they were meant to see.

This is a simple high level cache layer meant to speed up the site for our repeat users.

Layer 2 is a bit more involved. This is a lower level cache on things like the header, footer, layout, specific event data, etc.

These caches are cleared automatically when a related item is edited in Admin. For example, if you add an “Update” in Admin, the header and footer cache will automatically clear, ensuring the latest posts gets out instantly.

If for whatever reason these caches are giving you grief, please try the following:

1. --'Hard' refresh the page (shift and refresh on windows).
2. --Check out the brand new tab in your site's SASS editor called 'Cache Busters'. Here you can click a button and bust the cache for various parts of the site.
3. --Email us!

We're currently adjusting the timings on both layers of caching, and we will be adding more and more cache busters to the editor. Since we launched our new cache layer, site performance has done a dramatic and exciting increase, so we're hoping we can find a balance between caching data and having things be fresh where they need to be.

Optimizing Specific Heavily Used Calls

According to our stats, the Featured Events, Featured Venues, and User pages (and a few others) were all being hit heavily and not performing well. We spent a few days tweaking the way these work and increasing their speed dramatically. You might have noticed last week when we pushed out the Featured Event and Featured Venue changes, everything sped up! Not only did we add cache layers (bustable via the above instructions), but we trimmed the results down by removing some of the unneeded JSON, and we made it so that your Featured Venue widget only loads one venue, when it’s needed (previously, we were loading all Featured Venues with a single call even though your user only sees one at a time).

User pages were a bit harder to fix, but some SQL (database) optimization, coupled with some caching has us down to an average response time of 500ms compared to 1500 - 2000ms two weeks ago.

Updating the Load Order of the Javascript

In addition to removing and optimizing our Javascript, we tweaked the load order of all the page bits for what we think is best for user experience. Our new design relies heavily on asynchronous data loading - the core of the page loads and renders as fast as possible, then other data is loaded ‘after’ the page loads, which ensures our users see what they want to see fast, and the whole site feels more responsive. Even though our overall page load averages 4.5 seconds, users will see the page much sooner!

First priority is to display the page, then the ‘current user’ data is run and applied, and finally the brand ads / featured events / and featured venues are loaded. This means people can start viewing and interacting with the site much faster than the 4.5 seconds, while all the extra data loads faster and in the background.

Optimizing Images and Ensuring Multiple CDN Loads

This is something we did on the old site but hadn’t implemented on the new site. When a browser hits a page, there is a setting - unique to each browser - that determines the amount of things it will load from a specific domain name at the same time.

Lets say a page on the site has 30 images, and they’re all linked via the same domain. Your browser will grab them 5 at a time, which means it asks for 5 images, waits till they load, then asks for 5 more and so on until they finish.

What we did was implement code that breaks the image domains (we’re using Cloudinary for our images) into a randomish set of 5 domains. This means that when the browser sees 30 images, they’re spread over 5 domains, and it can load 25 at the same time instead of 5. Faster page completion times is the result.

Blocking Bad Bots

We love Google and Bing, and we’re OK with the old Yahoo bot, but beyond that we determined that other bots provide little value, and take up too much time and bandwidth. We’ve implemented a bot whitelist for the folks we like, and we’re telling the rest to leave us alone. This keeps some of the questionable bots from scraping page after page of the site, eating up our server and bandwidth performance.

In Summation

We are in a fantastic place, speed-wise, after this project. We will continue to optimize here and there, but as for our Official Project for the Episode, I think we can declare it a success, close it out, and move on to the Next Big Thing.

And that project is now officially accomplished!

We recently made the Giveaways button a permanent fixture on listing pages due to positive A/B test results. However, it makes the event cards HUGE on mobile and tablets, so we will be removing the button from those displays.

We are now A/B testing opening the RSVP/Giveaway entry form in a modal on listing pages instead of the event page. If you missed the details, you can review this recent update.

Take a first look at lenses with the SX artist info release. Much more to come as a tool to target content curation and presentation!

Some other progress made in the past few weeks:

• -- HTML enabled in sidebar of event and user pages for ads
• -- You now have ability to control your own footer web links: http://admin.dostuffmedia.com/social_links
• -- Default shortcut restored so you can omit event categories from the homepage
• -- Shortcuts now display repeating events and separates them out as individual events - as opposed to one event and option to view all "Every Tues"
• -- Sold out events display "Sold Out" in place of "Buy"
• -- 21+ not the appropriate age check for your RSVP event? You can now select the age check.

Thank you all so much for your continued contribution to our prioritization of the stuff that matters! For those of you that didn't have a chance to check it out, we added some clarification for how you can use the DSD queue to make that contribution.

Festivals

We've turned the corner toward fest season this year, so lineup launches are happening. GovBall, Hangout, Counterpoint and Jazz Fest all launched their lineups. And talks with Bonnaroo have begun to make sure we meet their requests.

NBD

Nokia's photo program was successfully delivered and is wrapping up.  According to Nokia and Cohn & Wolfe, we "smashed" their goals!

The other week, we at DoStuff packed into the conference room to hold our first network sales call of 2014 with you fine people. It was less awkward than this scenario because who doesn't love to talk plans to make money?

Pabst will be sponsoring launch parties for Do206 and Do214, and Goose is likely to renew the sponsored Tastemaker meetups. You all are leading conversations with brands from PopChips (Do312) to Fireball (Do317) to Chevy (Do512).

And of course, SX will be a big opportunity for partnerships as well as parties.

Also of note: moves are being made toward a national sales hire and we will update you as soon as those moves are official.

Speaking of New Team DoStuff Members

We are excited to welcome Jordan “Cinnamon Stick” Ripley to DoStuff. Some of you may have had the opportunity to meet him already. This marks his third week working with the Delivery Team (our new term for "support"), where his focus is on all things related to Market Development and Business Support. He’s already hard at work advising on proposals and tackling an E5 project to build support resources specifically for new metros.

How did Jordan stumble into DoStuff you might ask? He tells the story best, “I got to DoStuff by being the ginger coffee-fetching intern at Do512. I went to UT for school, and spent many an afternoon on the (hygienically dubious) couch in the Do512 office. I must've not screwed things up too terribly, because after graduating college and working for a couple years doing search engine marketing at Adlucent, they kindly invited me back to help out.”

Yep, he was a Do512er and knows his "stuff." He already wrote up guidance on how to optimize the visibility of your Facebook posts given a recent change Facebook made.

doNYC just celebrated its 1-year anniversary (fashionably late) with a stellar turn-out to not just one but TWO parties.  Check out pics from the first night:

And we in Austin are celebrating that we survived not just one but TWO ice-pocalypses (this past Tuesday hit us unexpectedly). To great social success, Do312 called out Do512 during the first storm:

Stay Warm

Team DoStuff Ep 5 Photo

Go DO awesome things. Questions or comments please send our way.

For those of you that want any clarity, we hope this helps!

The short answer: whichever is more convenient for you.

The longer answer: if the issue is something that applies to the network, it will be input in the queue no matter what.  If you email us and we input it in the queue, we will add you as a follower to that task.  If you input it in the queue directly, it makes the ticket immediately visible to all who may be experiencing the same issue or desiring the same improvement.

No matter what, we will address whatever it is in a timely manner. Urgent issues will be taken care of ASAP and requests will be listed by the order we plan to add them.

Always put your new item under the header "ADD ALL NEW ITEMS HERE:"*

That way a) you don't have to think twice whether it's a bug or request or a whole big project and

b) we see it immediately and move it to the appropriate bucket for you.

* It can be helpful to search for your item before adding to see if someone has input something similar and either heart or add details to the original.

After a new item is added, we will add it to one of the following buckets:

1) PROJECTS - we'll move it here if your request falls into a larger project that we have planned then we'll close out the individual ticket and point you to the project so you can follow along there
2) BUGS - we'll move it here if it's something not working
3) REQUESTS - we'll move it here if it is a tweak or change to functionality
4) CLARIFICATION - we'll move it here if we need more info from you or someone here at DoStuff

In PROJECTS, BUGS and REQUESTS, we will be working on them roughly in the order in which they are listed. 

Things that Determine Priority:

--- The affect on you and/or users. i.e. something broken that makes site unusable for users will get fixed fast. For others, you can show support via hearts.
--- Input from DoStuff delivery team (Kristin, Katie, Justin, Stuart & Adi).
--- Our longer term vision for building the product around which you can build a cultural institution that dominates your city for decades.

Gone To Dev

Once we decide to work on it, we will move the ticket to "GONE TO DEV:" at which point you can expect it to be completed within ~3 months (obviously if it's something causing real problems it will be done much faster).

We will comment with updates on the task and close it when complete. 

If your input has gone unaddressed and it's important, simply give us a nudge. 

Any further questions or clarity needed, please let us know!

Thank you all so much for the hard work and patience in the pursuit of awesomeness.

*From email sent 1/16*

Giant thanks to everyone who played along with our Episode planning by sharing your hearts with us. We wanted to share what our final selections are for the projects we’ll be working on for you for the next 15 weeks. In roughly the order they’ll be finished:

Of course we’ll be working on bugs and requests as well, but these are the big thrust of the Episode and what we feel like gives us the most WIN right now, and sets us up best for future.

NOT PRODUCT STUFF

Episodes aren’t all about Product here either. FAR from it. We have a TON we’re planning to accomplish in New Business Development (NBD) and Delivery/Support as well. A sampling lies below:

NBD

DELIVERY

2014 GOALS STUFF

We also spent a lot of time over the holidays defining our goals for 2014, and want to share them with you - since you’re such a big part of why we do what we do.

These goals - for the episode AND the year - are ambitious. Super ambitious. We don’t, and you shouldn’t, expect us to hit every one. If we do, we’re not being ambitious enough.  That being said, we will be CRANKING to deliver. and DELIVER we will.

LET US KMNOW WHAT YOU THINK

Hopefully you’re as excited about this year as we are. because...

IT IS GOING TO BE AWESOME.

hearts,

DoStuff