BIOS LEVEL

BIOS_LEVEL just published it’s first product review, the Ratpadz XT mousepad. I’m pretty excited. I finished writing it at 4:30AM, and sent out a few e-mails to other review sites to get some linkage for today. It’s time to try to drive some traffic and give the site a bit of a stress test.

I’ve got another review already in the works, as I previewed a week or so ago in the previous post. But we’re still waiting on more products to arrive in the mail!

As we near our opening, we realized we almost overlooked an important aspect on our website: an RSS feed. This blog has it’s own feed, but the BIOS_LEVEL main page has no feed of its own. While I was looking over this, many important questions arose:

1. How many items should we display?
2. Should we include articles and news, or a separate feed for each?
3. Should we allow links and images in the feed?

Luckily, it didn’t take long to decide on what to and what not to include. The final product gathers the latest product reviews and news feed. It orders them in time of posting, so everything is always up to date. This is not only great for us, but also for the sites that we feature in our news feed.

The only issue I ran in to was the merging of several database tables into one. Rather than query to MySQL database twice: once for reviews, and once for news, I chose to make a single query using the UNION term. It merges two queries that have an equal number of columns into a single table, where I can sort the entries as I please. The final product looked like something as below. Slightly complicated to read, but oh so fantastic in usage!

$query = "SELECT title,shortdesc,'a' AS type,UNIX_TIMESTAMP(id) FROM articles LIMIT 3 UNION SELECT t.topic_title AS title,p.post_text AS shortdesc,'n' AS type,t.topic_id AS id FROM phpbb_topics t,phpbb_posts_text p,phpbb_users u WHERE t.forum_id = 10 AND u.user_id = t.topic_poster AND t.topic_first_post_id = p.post_id LIMIT 7";

Oh, and you can’t subscribe to it yet. We’re putting it under feedburner in the morning.

We’ve all had our hands full the past two weeks, as most of us are staff with Pittco, which just held it’s 8th event this past weekend. Those of us who aren’t staff with Pittco were also there. As a result, progress was a little hampered, but we’ve still sent out quite a bit of e-mails looking for products to review. We’ve got a few in, so this is just a small preview of what’s to come in the next week or two.

We’re not telling what else we have. Not yet, anyways. Stay tuned =D