Site Upgrades 2011 Underway

The annual 'upgrade kenholic.com' bug has hit me again. I wonder if it's a real disease, like spring cleaning. Once a year, I launch a bunch of new features for my website, then I leave it alone for another year. O joy.

This year I plan a few speed improvements, like some backend caching of commonly used data and modules. I'll worry about data serving costs next year (or maybe never) since I don't expect exponential growth this year. As is, I have the capacity to serve about half of a million users a day. But for the most important task, I hope to launch a reviews database for my stuff and formalize the review system. Depending on how fancy I feel, I can possibly implement a recommendation engine based on my seeding and maybe some commonalities like genre or seiyuus. That would be neato, but would require a lot of work for new entries unless I can find a way to extract this data automatically.

In preparation, I've already done my once-a-year App Engine SDK upgrade and coded a starter project to play around with the App Engine datastore. Once nightly, I have a cron that parses my starcraft II profile for my match history and stores the data in datastore. I've gotten the hand of using of it, I think; but still getting familiar with the nuances of the GQL. Like to query on a dateproperty field, I needed to use date format function:

SELECT * FROM TABLE WHERE date = DATE('2011-01-23')

... ARGH, haha cost me 5 minutes of freaking out because of the errors I received when I just entered SELECT * FROM TABLE WHERE date = '2011-01-23' SQL style. Live and learn.