Delicious Library view enhancement & site backup schedule

[retromangia]

Howdy folks,

Retromangia here.. I just jumped ship from RFgeneration.com... (anyone else do the same?). Their last downtime caused a serious crash, and they lost months of data... including all my hard work i put in updating my collection... I loved their site, but unfortunately I just can't tolerate that.

So, VGcollect is where I call home now... and a sweet place it is... so much nicer than RFgeneration. The layout is great, the export feature, and updating the database is a breeze... no more waiting around a week for my game to be in the system.

One question I have for the VGcollect team is... how often do you guys backup your user collection databases?  I couldn't fathom the idea of losing a part of my collection all over again.

lastly.. a suggestion/enhancement I'd love to see for the site... The only other choice for me besides VGcollect,com is a program called Delicious Library... It looks AWESOME.. but unfortunately it's only for MAC... Has anyone ever used it and knows what I'm talking about?  It displays your entire collection on a virtual bookshelf, and looks amazing.  VGcollect still gets the gold medal as far as ease of use, but would it be possible in the future to have a "display your games on a virtual book shelf" option? .  I imagine just clicking a button, and then some kind of Javascript plugin could be used to generate your collection on a bookshelf.

If you coding guru's here can guarantee me that your site won't get hacked... or if it does, at least have nightly backups of data... and you create an virtual bookshelf plugin.. I would gladly donate money to the site.

regards,
Retromangia

[matt]

Retro,

Welcome to the site! I do all the development here and always love hearing suggestions. To address your database concerns we have multiple levels of backups in place. We actually learned our lesson the hard way early on an I immediately took measures to ensure that it'd never happen again. I have an on-site and off site backup that runs at midnight est. The onsite backup archives the database as well as the files, then the off-site backup is actually synced to DropBox and downloaded to my local PC. At it's worst if we ever had a data issue we'd be out no more than 12 hours worth of data. I take our data seriously and will always be proactive in protecting it.

I'm close to calling it a night so I'll address your other suggestion tomorrow.

Thanks again for joining the community!

[matt]

This is something I whipped up a few months ago to test a few alternative views:

http://vgcollect.com/temp/shelf.php?username=matt (must be logged in)

I'm looking into ways we can merge a view like this with the existing site while retaining all of the functionality.

[scott]

Ha Saturn box art breaks it. And makes the whole row hang below the shelf they a supposed to be sitting on...

[desocietas]

Ha Saturn box art breaks it. And makes the whole row hang below the shelf they a supposed to be sitting on...

Yeah, and the second and fourth shelf have Steam and DS games floating..  But the 1st and 3rd shelves look great!

[matt]

@desocietas, @scott Those should both be fixed.

I also updated the url so make sure you pass your username with it.

[desocietas]

@desocietas, @scott Those should both be fixed.

I also updated the url so make sure you pass your username with it.

Whoa, that was a quick fix!  Looks great - thanks so much.

[foxhack]

Wow, this looks sweet. Almost like my GOG shelf!

[matt]

@foxhack oh wow never knew that existed. I'm going to tweak our graphics a bit before we go live though. What's up there now was simply stolen borrowed from Apply.

[jcalder8]

@matt my wife loved the look of the shelf view, but she said since I can view it all online now that we can box everything up so please delete that view as soon as possible!

[foxhack]

@foxhack oh wow never knew that existed. I'm going to tweak our graphics a bit before we go live though. What's up there now was simply stolen borrowed from Apply.

Actually, my link is a user-created clone of our shelf at GOG. People at the GOG forums can sign up for the Wiki and have a public shelf by using a Greasemonkey script.

There's another game collection site that uses a similar look, but that one is slooooooooooow. Not to mention, the artwork is all messed up since they don't concentrate on item variants like we do.

[scott]

@matt my wife loved the look of the shelf view, but she said since I can view it all online now that we can box everything up so please delete that view as soon as possible!

I got a good chuckle out of this. Personally, I don't have much use for the shelf view, while I think it's neat for novelty.

[matt]

@jcalder8 Just tell her it's in beta and doesn't work right so the real shelves will have to stay!

@foxhack I know the site you are referring to. Looks pretty but am not a big fan of how the database is integrated. Doesn't accout for any variations and you have to jump through some hoops to edit. Regardless, I love competition!

@scott The more I play with it, the more functional it becomes. I actually really like the look and feel. It just lacks some of the functionality but I'll be adding that asap.

[darko]

Aesthetically I'm not the biggest fan of the wooden shelves. I mean, it's a neat idea but imo it doesn't look as clean and tidy as the rest of the site.

[matt]

@darko I'll be updating those graphics soon to something a bit more vgcollect-like. I simply took a screen of iBooks and used their stuff ha.