Hi Everyone,

We are hard at work on a major (and somewhat total) site revamp right now that will be landing in a few months… but we did want to squeak out a small update with some bug fixes and a new tracking gadget on your member home page.

Your gamerDNA Track List

This tracking widget allows you to pick up to 20 friends and get updates about what they are playing right now, or have played recently. It gives you a quick one-shot look at what everyone has done recently.

By clicking the "edit" link next to the track list, you can select which friends you want to actively track. Their status and game play history will then update on this gadget every 5 minutes.

You can also click "View All Friends" and get status updates for everyone on the widget (20 per page) if you are curious what your extended network is doing.

This is a small first step towards a completely revamped member homepage that not only delivers real-time content about the games you like, but also updates around the your friends and people that you might find interesting.

GamerDNA Helix

We continue to move forward with great progress on our API called gamerDNA Helix. If you are a developer, skilled in the ways of XML APIs… check out our beta documentation. We are interestedin any feedback that you have to offer about how our API evolves. We have some pretty cool things in store that will empower you to create a variety of deeply integrated applications.

View the beta documentation here:
http://docs.google.com/View?id=dcrj8bnk_25chkxgwhp

Please note, that this documentation is subject to change. Any API discussion/questions can be submitted in the API Forum.

The full list of updates in this release after the jump!

Profile Changes/Updates

• Implemented the presence gadget on member home. It shows presence of two sets of people. 1) your tracked friends and 2) all friends. You can also configure which of your friends are tracked by clicking on the edit button within the component.
• Built the systems for requesting presence from Xfire and Xbox. Steam coming this week.
• Created a notice for users that do not have any users set to track that gives instructions one why/how to get started.
• Removed challenge progress and company blog widgets from member home to make space for presence. Challenges will be coming back bigger and better than ever as a new badge system.

API Changes/Updates

• Extended the Attention HELIX call to contain more data to prevent numerous calls against our database.
• Completed all test cases for HELIX for the new methods.
• Fixed an issue where a test case was reporting as successful even when it was not.
• AlsoPlaying enhancements complete for HELIX.
• Created member game activity method
• Created member game post.
• Created member reviews method
• Added method to request user presence.
• Repaired a cache call that was causing the games:attention helix call to report a 500 error on every second request.

General Site Changes/Updates

• Put in a two tier caching system to prevent pileups on the homepage when the stat cache expires.
• Added new caching to header (has to intelligently break out certain pieces and expire caches manually when you view a game or member), footer, game page: top players widget
• Tracked down some "Operation Aborted" errors that were appearing in Ie7 due to some javascript behavior.
• Due to changes to realm war, we had to make some changes to handle the new data.
• Fixed an issue with the profanity filter that was causing it to crash when checking strings.
• Fixed a bug where the game type ahead wasn’t functioning properly in IE7.
• Cleaned up some style issues that were appearing on the Now page in certain situations.
• Corrected an issue with the Shaiya guild theme not showing buttons correctly.