Recent Entries

1Ron posted:

17 December 06, 09:09:57 AM

I've followed your concept & development proces closely, and i have to say that you've created something great in such a short time!

I'm also very glad that you found a name for the project! Now i can focus on my own work again ;)

2paul haine posted:

17 December 06, 09:28:52 AM

Looks great...but how about adding GBA, PSP and DS...? And maybe PC as well?

3Jeroen Mulder posted:

17 December 06, 10:02:54 AM

Paul, those are the plans, yes. :-)

4Tim Hofman posted:

17 December 06, 15:59:22 PM

Great project, crumbl is going to replace my way too big list of feeds. I'm sure many others are going to use it instead of all those feeds.

I really like the design/layout too! It doesn't try to rip my eyeballs out while scimming through the content :).

5Ro posted:

18 December 06, 03:29:23 AM

Although the site in itself is cool, I have the need to point out that there's a similar website (though more generic) out there: Netvibes.

You can add multiple feeds and/or distribute them among multiple tabs as well.

No, this is not meant as an advertisement, but you got to remember that almost everything has been done before. :)

6Jeroen Mulder posted:

18 December 06, 03:50:23 AM

Ro, I'm well aware of the current players in the space. Though I wouldn't consider Netvibes to even come near it, there are similar ones.

The question is: does it matter? Does that make Crumbl.com any less usefull? For me, the goal is to just do it better ;-)

7Stephen posted:

18 December 06, 17:59:23 PM

Very nice Jeroen! I think this is by far the nicest and cleanest layout I've seen for a site of this type. I don't usually follow gaming news because it is too much trouble but now I don't have any excuses :-)

8Frances Berriman posted:

29 December 06, 09:33:45 AM

woah.. a blog post AND a site launch. Yay. :D Looks swish though.

9Are posted:

15 January 07, 00:13:51 AM

Nice site! It's been awhile since you've posted Jeroen. I must say, it is very exciting to always see work from you. I love this site. Gaming news has been really poor for me because of all the different news sources. Now that you have created this site, I go there all the time to check up on my gaming news.

10Hayden Noonan posted:

27 January 07, 22:10:05 PM

Crumbl is my new favourite site! I never really started getting into the whole news about gaming consoles and such until I got a Wii, and since then, I've been browsing GameSpot nearly everyday, but it was always hard to find stuff, in my opinion; Crumbl just makes it that much easier!

Can we expect the new version of JeroenMulder to be up anytime soon? ;)

11Kilian Valkhof posted:

30 January 07, 12:58:19 PM

Nice looking site Jeroen! Looks very clean, and quite a relief that, once I get a Wii, i can visit one site for all the news about it :)

Hope to see you at the Happy clog meeting!

12Aaron Brazell posted:

10 February 07, 10:39:04 AM

Nice work.

As a sidenote, why is your feed "Subject only"?

13Jeroen Mulder posted:

11 February 07, 13:03:33 PM

Aaron, good hearing from you again! Been a long time since the SPF days.

I assume you mean my blog's feed? Good question. I honestly do not know. Bear in mind I made this over three years ago and I've been trying to redo it for the past two years. ;-)

I'll try to change that when I find the time, because it's absolutely stupid.

02-11, 19:55 GMT: It should include full text now. Quick and a bit of a dirty job, so let me know if there are any problems.

14kb posted:

22 February 07, 05:35:20 AM

Excellent modern clean design. But where is any logo?

15Jeroen Mulder posted:

22 February 07, 10:08:31 AM

kb, thank you for your kind words.

Regarding the lack of a mind-blowing logo -- who cares? Honestly, logo's are so overrated for most websites. They become important once you want to establish a brand and need to deliver a consistent message to your audience in all of your different communication channels.

This is not the case yet. The word in the current typeface is all that is necessary. The logo is secondary to the content.

16Niels Keurentjes posted:

01 March 07, 20:28:29 PM

Yo Jeroen. I was surprised to find references from Crumbl in our stats (today's fresh stats day when they aren't so incredibly polluted yet ;) ) so had a look around, and I must say it's indeed a stunning piece of art and functionality!

And apart from that I must compliment you on your picks for the top-left positions of every platforms ;)

17Jeroen Mulder posted:

02 March 07, 03:07:00 AM

Niels, thanks! However, you must thank you and the rest from the ICGamers network for the great work you do. It was definitely no random placement ;-)

18Essen posted:

05 March 07, 09:25:01 AM

Very clear design,it´s a nice work.

19Jesper Andersson posted:

17 March 07, 04:46:40 AM

Good stuff, I was surprised to see that you were behind the site when I stumbled upon it. Small world.. :)

Anyhow, it's now in my bookmarks. Very usefull!

20john posted:

23 April 07, 07:47:46 AM

yes definitely usefull!
thanks

21mike posted:

07 May 07, 01:25:36 AM

thank you for this

22Gnack posted:

17 May 07, 20:23:38 PM

Very nice work mate, I'll definitely be using this. Your ability to produce simple, clean work has always impressed and inspired me. Keep on doing the good thing man :o)

23Stefan posted:

11 June 07, 02:14:40 AM

I'm curious as to how difficult this was for you to set up? Does it require an advanced knowledge of RSS feeds, CSS or PHP?

I think this is a great idea and I hope it really takes off for you!

24Jeroen Mulder posted:

12 June 07, 03:55:25 AM

Stefan, thank you.

The PHP does all the work really. Like I mentioned in the original post, I used a development version of MagpieRSS. Depending on your needs you could also use SimplePie. The main difference, as I experienced it, is that MagpieRSS supports repeated elements and normalizes feeds without touching namespaced elements, whereas SimplePie does not support repeated elements and drops namespaced elements (though this could very well be an option nowadays).

All it takes is setting up the parser, dealing with the various encoding issues you'll run into (headaches), comparing local with feed data and writing a clever algorithm that minimizes database activity while still allowing inserts and updates of local data.

The synchronisation process is run every five minutes now. On top of that I added some cacheing, just in case things do get busy at some point.

It takes quite some more effort to support many and custom feeds than just supporting the RSS specification. So, whether it's advanced PHP depends on what you want to do. Crumbl supports regular text and video feeds (these are optimized for Gametrailers right now) where the process is written in just short of 500 lines of code.

The real challenge was designing an added layer of abstraction that would allow me to define the layout and location of information inside a feed on a per-site basis, so I could normalize all feeds and take full advantage of any custom namespaced elements that are included (see Gametrailers'). Along with this I have a layer in place that allows me to automatically apply filters for each piece of information so I can even shape the information in just the way I want to.

The entire project took me about two weeks from design to code with both being split 40/60.

25M. Flyer posted:

30 June 07, 07:13:10 AM

Hallo Jeroen.

The website Design is beautiful, but the overview is not so well man by information is estimated. Otherwise O.K

26Video Game Trailers posted:

11 May 08, 10:08:06 AM

Excellent Work , please keep up this work