What was the final Zoonometer™ count?  You can find out here…

So we’re well on our way now to our target of 1 million clicks in 100 hours.  Not that we want to get complacent though – keep classifying everyone!

Being part of Galaxy Zoo gives me the opportunity to combine web technologies with science, a perfect mix!  When we came up with the idea of the Zoonometer™ we decided that if possible we’d like the total to update in near-relatime.  We launched the Zoonometer™ with it auto-updating every 10 seconds but quickly realised with the sheer number of people coming to Galaxy Zoo, this continual refreshing was causing the database to get pretty slow.  So onto version  1.1 of the Zoonometer™.  We’re now caching the count and recalcualting the total every minute and I’m pleased to say we’ve significantly lowered the load on the servers.

One side effect of this caching however is that if you refresh the browser you might hit one of the other webservers which has its own internal cached value.  There’s nothing funny going on I promise but you sometimes might see the  Zoonometer™ jump around a little.

Cheers

Arfon

I’ve had a busy Saturday morning updating the Galaxy Zoo site with some new bits and bobs.   Probably the most useful change deployed this morning is that each question now has a help section for you to check exactly what we’re asking and some examples to help guide you.  If you’re struggling with a question then click the link in the bottom right titled “Need help?”.  This was by far our most requested feature so I’m really pleased to be able to bring it to you.

Another frequently requested change was the ability to see how many galaxies you’ve classified so far.  On the “My Galaxies” you’ll now find a section called “My Activity”.  The “My Activity” section shows a running total of how many galaxies you’ve classified and also when you last classified.

Finally I made some pretty big changes to our database this morning also but I’ll save those details for another post…

Cheers

Arfon

As some of you may already know I’m relatively new to the Galaxy Zoo team having joined in January.  One of the main reasons I was brought on board the team was to help plan and implement a more scalable web architecture for the future.

Galaxy Zoo 2 launched on Tuesday and was our first live test of our new approach. I’m pleased to say that apart from a small hiccup with our database server on day two we’ve managed to collect 3.7 million classifications in just over three days – well done everyone!

*Warning here begins gory technical details!* You can safely stop reading here unless you are a techy.

Galaxy Zoo is now hosted on Amazon Web Services.  We are using a combination of S3 (their storage solution) for hosting the galaxy images, EC2 (their compute service) for the Galaxy Zoo website (and our super-secret API) and EBS (Elastic Block Store) for instant backups of our databases. The great thing about Amazon Web Services is that you pay for what you use (by the hour) and more significantly you can scale up to as many servers as you like to handle the load you are experiencing when busy.

Those of you who are particularly observant may have also noticed that the Zoo 2 site is now written in the web framework Ruby on Rails. Rails is great fit for us, it’s a modern web framework that follows a great design pattern (MVC) and encourages best practice development.

For those of you who have found the last two paragraphs interesting, I’m going to find a place where I can write about what we are up to on the technical side of things. Watch this space!

Cheers,

Arfon.