Just an update on the GMail delivery problems from eve-central.com. Of the 30-odd addresses subscribed from gmail, we were happily delivering mail to all of them with no bounces and other service interruptions. All it took was setting “Precedence: bulk” in the mail headers and GMail took the e-mail.
Now it seems any amount of volume we push to GMail causes the server to rate-limit messages. And rate-limiting messages means we have an ever growing backlog of e-mail which never gets delivered, making the whole feed less than useful. At this time there is no real solution to this problem.
When subscribing to the e-mail feed, make sure your account can handle THOUSANDS of messages per day. Many ISP accounts just don’t like this type of volume and aren’t good choices. GMail used to be an acceptable choice, but isn’t at this point. The best choice is still your own hosting account or dedicated server, where you can do real-time processing.
We’ll monitor the situation and turn delivery to a few gmail accounts on peridoically, but no guarantees.
I’m pushing out a new update to the site today. Several new features are included and bugs are fixed:
- The API has bug fixes related to the minimum quantity filter being misapplied and overridden in certain cases. The behavior should be consistent now.
- Top bar is now left aligned - looks a bit better?
- The logout button works again (yay!)
- Added a new Trade section, which includes the new Comparison tool I’ve blogged about earlier, in BETA form. There is no cost (ISK wise) to use at this moment (haven’t gotten about getting the subscription interface written yet). You need to be logged in to use this feature though. If you have any feedback and improvements, send me an e-mail or comment here in the blog.
Expect more updates soon 
Just a quick one, showing off a new screenshot of the trade compare tool. See it here. Also implemented is a nifty little autocomplete AJAX feature for the system and region names.
I’ll be re-using this YUI component for the market type searching as well, with a fallback to the current page. Note that the autocomplete is not IGB compatible, but the trade comparison tool as a whole is not either (due to large page sizes and lots of presented information), making it a non-issue.
Also, I’m working on a market sell movement application to try to track volumes moved. The data to back this isn’t perfect by any chance, but perhaps will provide an overinflated view of the actual item movement.
I’ve taken the chance now to upgrade some of our APIs, make them more consistent, cleaner, and better documented.
The first primary change is moving from the old /home namespace to the new /api namespace. This allows for some cleaner separation of the logic and not the old mismash of stuff. I’ve also cleaned up the marketstat API, allowing multiple type IDs to be passed in a single query.
The new API has a version header now as well <evec_api version=”2.0″>…</evec_api>. You can distinguish responses, and possibly in the future request specific versions of formatting.
As before, the API is open, not requiring a key to use. I’ve contemplated a key based approach but haven’t deemed in necessary yet. If you suddenly find you can’t connect to the server - you’ve probably been doing something naughty (or it broke).
I have a few IPs blocked for bone-headed use of the system - such as querying every typeID from 1 to 100000000, and in string order at that. Don’t do that 
The old APIs based off of /home will continue to work for now. It would be a perfect world if everything would upgrade, but thats not always possible. I’ll monitor usage of both and cut off the old one once its no longer popular.
Many nifty things are afoot for EVE-Central.com. For one, I migrated away from mod_python, which was hanging up the Apache process several times per day for unknown reasons. There was even a monitor script to kill -9, ipcrm, and restart Apache if it wasn’t responding - this horrible restart was happening several times a day. The new EVE-Central.com is running CherryPy as the backend server now - the conversion was quick and painless, plus it performs better (barring any new introduced bugs).
On the new feature front, I’m working on a trade comparison tool for sell orders, trying to find price differences between systems or regions. Its in an alpha prototype stage, so not for public consumption yet. I expect it to launch in a week or two. Here is a link to a sample image.
I’m also mulling over a possible Premium subscription to EVE-Central. Paid in ISK, it would allow access to the aforementioned trade comparison tool, plus other options, such as ad-free view, and the ability to upload “premium” content which would not get pushed to normal users until a small time window had elapsed. Details still sketchy at this point
I get the occasional question about someone’s browser being seemingly stuck in “IGB” mode. Usually, its not actually stuck, the user was simply expecting some more graphical pizzaz out of EVE-Central.com.
So, why is the interface so bland? Maintainability is the primary reason. The EVE-Online in game browser is a rather buggy, slow, and temperamental beast. CSS support is worse than Netscape 4, and performance is akin to a Pentium 66 rendering a huge table - it just can’t do it without a week long crunch. Hence all of the market information is limited (only 10 entries or so per table, etc) and no stylesheets or other fun stuff is used.
So why is the main, non-IGB interface so bland too? Primarily for not having to maintain two sets of templates and remembering to update both to fix something or enhance something.
Is it me being somewhat lazy? Yes, of course :). I’ve had some contributions for new designs, which come in all sorts of nice colors and DIVs and Javascript - but didn’t really enhance the datamining aspects of EVEC.
We’ll just call the look the Google 1.0 look and work on adding newer features.
