Every second counts: making Thunderbolt sustainable

Published on 21^st January 2010 in Productivity, Usability, Websites, tagged sustainability, Thunderbolt.

When I founded Thunderbolt over nine years ago, the web was a very different place. There was no Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr or even Wikipedia. Nine years is a huge amount of time on the web and most sites don’t manage to last half of that, especially smaller ones. So how did we manage to keep our little website going and grow it into what it is today?

Our greatest asset is also our biggest problem: people’s time. We’re a volunteer-run site and all of our editors are employed full-time, either at regular day jobs or as students. Even with six editors capable of publishing articles, it could be hard to keep up with the constant stream of articles. However, over the last couple of years I’ve worked on making Thunderbolt sustainable by slimming down our publishing workflow.

Analysing the submission process

Let’s first take a look at our workflow from three years ago:

An author writes their article.
They post in a private staff forum.
Other writers peer-review the article, checking for typos, grammar and other errors.
The author submits the article in the content management system (CMS).
An editor finds suitable images on the web and downloads them to their computer.
Screenshots are renamed.
Then resized.
Three header images are created.
All of the images are uploaded to the CMS.
The editor adds the image HTML to the article.
The article is given a final check and then published.

As you can see, it can add up to a lot of work! There are some things that we can’t remove or trim down though. Articles still have to be proofread, images need to be found and the data needs to be input into the CMS one way or another. However, we have managed to remove the most time consuming part of the process; sorting out images.

Image finding assistance

The new image finding tools cut down on precious seconds.

The first task is to find suitable images and this is done by checking multiple websites. Depending on the obscurity of the game and the availability of watermark-free screenshots, this can take easily become the most time consuming part of the whole process.

We generally look for images on three websites and for each one, the editor used to have to do the following:

Select the title of the game.
Copy the text.
Open a new tab or window.
Go to the website they want to search.
Find the search bar and paste the text into it.
Click the search button.
View the results and pick appropriate images.

Much of that process is unnecessary and when you consider that we might do that three times per article, it can add up to a lot of time. However, we’ve managed to eliminate almost all of the steps above with a simple addition to our CMS. When you open an article to edit, there’s a box in the sidebar called “Find images”. This contains links to search result pages on the sites we commonly use, with the search query automatically filled out in the URL. The video below shows the difference between this process before and after the “Find images” box was added.

Automatically processing images

In the old CMS, once an editor has saved screenshots to their computer, they had to rename each file and resize them to the correct dimensions. This could take several minutes, significantly adding to their overall workflow time. In addition to screenshots, header images must be created. These come in three sizes, each of which has to be created.

However, in our current CMS, the image uploader does all of the file renaming and resizing of screenshots. It also creates one of the three header images automatically. Editors still have to create two of those header images, but this isn’t too bad when you don’t have to edit a bunch of screenshots as well.

Highlighting the current state of articles

When new articles are submitted by writers, they appear at the top of the CMS’s homepage in a large red box, showing editors that they need to be published. I started to notice an interesting pattern of behaviour around this though. Sometimes writers would prepare and upload images themselves before submitting them to the CMS. All editors had to do was click one button to publish the article. However, those articles which were ready never got published any quicker.

The reason behind this was that editors associated the same amount of time with every article. If they saw an article in the CMS that needed to be published, they would wait until they had 15 minutes spare to deal with it. They never knew that it was ready to go because they assumed that all unpublished articles need images.

To solve this, I added a simple icon to the list which indicates what state an article’s images are in. At a glance, editors can now see if the screenshots, the header images or both are ready. Now if writers prepare their own images, their articles are published quicker, which is a great incentive to do so. The by-product of this is that editors have to prepare fewer images and the workload is more distributed.