Finally the news and games pages are complete. These pages were working before, but were not functionally complete. We believe we now have them to their final version for beta testing.

News Page
To start, the news page was hard to read, so we adopted a list-per-game style approach where any game with news content shows up links to the latest 4 articles for that game, sorted based on the latest news. Also, the site news section now works so that you can browse our internal news.

Games Page
The games page is finally at a stage where it is usable. We now support 85 games, which was alot to show all at once, so we added filtering and sorting and searching capabilities. We plan to default to "most popular" once we have a bit more content in the site.

Well, thats it for now. Enyoy!

Its been a long time since our last update, but its time to get back to the swing of things. Our long hiatus was mostly due to other ongoing projects that took up our time, as well as some new additions to the family on the way. But, its time to solidier on.

We started implemented our news service yesterday and finally have some content for you guys to read. What we plan to do is pull news content from several sources and aggregate them together for each game we support. You will notice the latest news appears on the home page, as well as the latest 5 news articles for each game on the news page. You can drill into each game and browse through the archive of all the news we have on record for that game. Give it a look »

Its been a little bit since my last post, so we have alot more to report this time.

HTML Editors
We spent alot of time over the last 3 weeks finding a good solution for our HTML editor, and finally have one in place that seems to work the best. We worked out all the issues we could with our editor and implemented it site wide. We also enhanced it to have more knowledge about compatible browsers in which case it will show as a standard textbox if its not supported. In the case where the browser is supported, but it just doesnt want to work right, we now have a link to show the standard box just in case.

Editor Use Revised 
We also took some time and revised how we use the editor on the site. Instead of using it everwhere we needed it, which often makes the pages load slower, we minimized its use and in some cases left a standard textbox with an "edit html" button to pop up the editor in a new window. This improved site performance quite a bit, only loading the editor when you need it. There a some places we still use it outright, but in most cases its on its own page, away from any of the larger content.

Messaging System Completed
Our messaging system is now in place and ready to use. You can use the "send message" or "contact" links on each member's profiles to send him/her a message and they can reply, forward or save that message in their saved folder. Its functionality should be very familiar to you since we did not try to reinvent the wheel with this.

Profile Rating System
We now have the rating system in place on profiles, which you will notice in the stats secion of each profile page as a series of white stars. You can rate anyone, and you get points to do so (more about points later). That member can then view his/her overall rating as well as the last 25 ratings and who rated him. The net affect of ratings will help our search engine better rank member search results. We may also have a "top members" list later on.

Points System
We also have our points system half completed at this time. We have the points tracking part in place, so all of your actions you are getting credit for, but we dont have a way to spend them yet. We will be adding the "upgrade account" section done shortly where you can either become a premium member, or purchase upgrades with points.

Delete My Account
Not that you would want to :) but our delete account functionality is now implemented. Just in the OFF chance that you hate the site and want to leave... but why would you?

Whats Next
We also started building out some of the content pages on the site, such as the home page and soon some of the news pages. We plan to aggregate news about specific games from many different sources so you get a wide spectrum of information from all over the gaming world.

Until next time...

HTML Editors
For the past week or so we have been trying our best to find a really good HTML editor that works well on alot of modern browsers and finally found one we like. You can see the features we were looking for by simply adding comments on someones page or editing your profile. We wanted to give our users a rich experience in being able to customize the content they put into the site as much as possible. And so we have it!

Messaging System
We also have the beginnings of our messaging system in place, so you can now send messages to other members and it will show up in their "my messages" section of their admin page. We havent quite finished it yet since you cannot view the message details and reply/forward them yet. That will be next now that we have a good HTML editor to use for these features.

My Account Page
You may also notice that the my account page has been reorganized once again, with a nice animated navigation section on the left that holds all of the navigation items. We dropped the use of tabs at the top since it was too difficult to find things. We are also adding alot of ajax functionality to the site to add a richer experience and feel to the site than before. The animated navigation being one of them.

Search Page
Our long needed search page is finally up and running. The main search works and will help you find people at this point. The members search will be working shortly. We will be adding more functionality to the page as we get the rest of the content built into the site. More to come soon.

Today we reorganized the profile page header a bit and added a couple profile features - a "headline" on your account info, and an extended "about myself" box on the profile info section that will show up on your page below your profile questions/answers. We also got the custom page sections working and rendering on your profile page. A good example is the graphic i added to the top of my profile page. You will find that under the "page setup" tab in edit my profile.

Well, finally our friends list functionality is complete. You can now request friends to be added to your list, and they can approve or reject them from their account page. We also got more of the internal functionality working like paging and notifications. Tomorrow we plan to revise the avatar system to allow users to select from a library of predefined avatars categorized by game, or use one of their photos. Only the second have of that is working as it is now. Until then, cheers!

Today we got the pictures and avatars working throughout the profiles section. You can now upload any photos and pick one as your default photo (aka, avatar). We also got part of the blogs system working (so I dont have to post them manually anymore...) so you can now post your blogs. The edit feature we are working on next.

As the lead developer of gamestreet I want to post our progress in builing the site in regular blog posts here. Keep checking periodically for updates and to see what is new and operational with the site.