Chipmark Development Blog

    As many of you already know, Chipmark is run by a team of University of Minnesota Seniors. In past years, support for Chipmark has dropped to a minimum over the Summer. This year, even though the team is graduating, a few of us have volunteered to monitor support emails and keep an eye on the server. Next year’s team will take over the project in early September.

It is currently finals week here at the U. All but three of us made it to the graduation ceremony at Northrop Auditorium last Friday. The parents snapped some good photos of the Chipmark team in their caps and gowns.

We have a few updates to push out before we call it quits for the semester. We will be adding the tour videos, a missing photo of one of our team members, and some minor UI changes. Expect to see those in the next few days.

For our latest release, we implemented a chipmark recommendation system. In no way are the recommendations used to promote other websites or products. The recommendations are generated using an algorithm that examines a user’s existing chipmarks against every other user’s chipmarks. The algorithm was borrowed from the GroupLens research, also from the University of Minnesota. The recommendation system is run once every week, and it takes approximately six hours to complete.

When the thread is awoken to generate recommendations, a script is run that exports each user and their chipmarks from the database to a flat file. A parser then reads that file into memory. Once the data is in memory, the data is divided up between four threads. The chipmarks of user a are compared to the chipmarks of users b, c, d, etc. The recommender finds the user that has the highest number of chipmarks in common with user a, we’ll call him user x. The system then finds five chipmarks that user x has that user a does not have. Those five chipmarks will be recommended for user a. This repeats for each user.

Any feedback on how relevant these recommendations are would be appreciated. Feel free to examine the source code. The relevant code is located in the bookmarks.recommender package.

In response to the flood of feedback regarding the absent sorting feature, a lot of effort was put in over the past day or so to revive it. Chipmarks can now be sorted by name, date added, and public/private designation. They can also be reorganized manually via drag & drop. Any changes you make to the sort order of your chipmarks are immediately saved, and will persist throughout all of the different chipmark interfaces (web, firefox extension and IE plugin) even after logging out. Full-folder sorts work on a folder-by-folder basis. Note that if you make changes via the web interface, you may have to refresh your chipmarks in the browser extensions before they will show up there.

Additionally, any users that noticed a sudden and strange change in the order of your chipmarks will be happy to know that your previous sort order should now be restored!

We realized now the the new WebUI isn’t letting you arbitrary re-arrange chipmarks as to your heart’s content. The fellow in charge of this is being pestered and working for a fix.

Sorry for the inconvenience in the meantime, it’s bugging me too!

With only some minor hiccups, we have managed to release 3.1 unto the world.

This release contains a complete overhaul of our WebUI and some new features for the plugins as well.

I’ll mention some tidbits from the Firefox release, specifically:

• The addon now displays a little icon and asks for confirmation if you add a chipmark that you’ve already added before. This helps if you have a lot of chipmarks and forgot if you’ve added something or not.
• Since there are some adult websites in the database we implemented a content filter to block out adult material unless disabled. This can be done from the WebUI or the plugin.
• You can now share folders with another user, making all chipmarks within that folder available to them to look at.
• There is now a preference for having chipmarks open in new tabs from the chipmark menu.
• Naturally, a bunch of bug fixes that people were requesting. Please send us feedback if you are still experiencing an old problem or have noticed something new!
• We also have a simple recommendation system that should populate in a day or so. It’s fairly primitive, but it could amuse some.
• By popular demand, the random chipmark functionality refreshes every click now.

There’s a lot more of course, but perhaps I’ll leave that for some of the other team members to discuss.