Live Blogging Less Sucky (Maybe)

Microsoft has a big press conference later today. I'm so excited that I decided to upgrade the live blogging component of my site.

A bit of history. I originally made my live blogging tool just before Microsoft's E3 press conference last year. I'd arrived in LA the day before the show and, after getting my badge, ended up falling asleep in the afternoon and waking up in the evening. With about 12 hours left until the start of the press conference, I decided to implement a super quick live updater -- that is, a bit of javascript which automatically fetches updates from the server so users won't have to refresh.

No one actually read my MS press conference live blog, as the site had just launched in the weeks prior. The first real test was at September's Level-5 press conference, as I was the only person live blogging from there. Unfortunately, this ended up being a total failure, as my server got totally overwhelmed.

For today's MS press conference, I'm using the same server. The changes I made were basically to reduce the amount of data transfer, reduce the number of data requests, and implement some contingency plans for when things go horribly wrong. It's still not anywhere near as optimized as it can be, but I think it will be a lot better than before. And failing that, I'm also live blogging for IGN Xbox 360, so you can get your updates there in the case of server issues on my side.