4fite.com Blog

I’m trying out a new change - player avatars are now loaded from the Steam site once, and then cached on 4fite, as opposed to telling your browser to load them from Valve’s servers.

This should mean that old profiles that don’t get updated will continue to have valid avatars even when the source profile’s avatar is changed on the Steam site. Also, it paves the way for some future additions to the site. If this doesn’t put too much of a strain on the storage and bandwidth costs, the change will be optimised, kept in place and applied to group avatars, too.

There’s a handful of invalid profile avatars that cropped up during the transition, but they should be fixed up automatically by future updates.

In other news, I took a trip to Valve last week for a job interview… a major excursion considering I live in Australia. Unfortunately I didn’t get the job, for reasons of experience. Most of my experience so far is in tiny agencies working on small - medium websites. I’d like to thank Valve for the hospitality and opportunity anyway. We should be keeping in touch for future prospects, and working together to improve both of our web offerings.

Valve added little country flags to their steamcommunity.com profile pages, similar to the ones on 4fite.com, which temporarily broke my processing of your country > province > city selection. All fixed now though.

If anyone reading this knows where I can grab the set of flag graphics that sites tend to use, chime in please. I’ve been making my own from larger flag graphics but I’m sure there’s a premade and coded set floating around, I just couldn’t locate it when I searched.

I could link to the new ones on steamcommunity but I try to limit that to avatars only.

Update: After a little searching using more sensible keywords, I tracked down the apparent home of the flag set. Sweet. They should make their way onto my site soon.