I've recently been tearing through various video tutorials that are out there including the ones produced by the fine folks over at railscasts.com.

A recent favorite that I've watched and implemented on Fan Profiles is the one about Site Wide Announcements. This is something that is pretty essential to any growing online community. Sooner or later you're going to want to message all your users about something, whether it be scheduled maintenance, new features, or other bits of info that may be relevant to the community as a whole.

One of the many cool projects that we've been working on is a killer new game available on Facebook. It's call Fight for the Top and it's probably the best Facebook sports app evar.

Today we launched the announcement system and have more than doubled the number of Fight for the Top users we had prior to today in a short few hours. We haven't done any promo for the app up to this point and it hasn't been available for very long but it was nice to see that the announcement system had an immediate effect on its user base.

I made a few tweaks to fit the code that Ryan covers in his screencast to make it work within Fan Profiles but for the most part kept it pretty much the same. Another great thing about these screencasts is that many others from the community offer up their input and/or improvements in the comments section. In this episode there was some good stuff added to railsforum.com and geoff.evason.name that is worth a look. In particular, the Geoff Evanson tips included using a cookie to track wheather a message has been hidden instead of a session which I found to be handy.