LGF Front Page > TagViewer (entries by tag)
I had to take down the front page live comment updates for a couple of days to figure out why MySQL was deadlocking. We all know how painful that can be. Turns out that MyISAM tables suffer from an obscure problem related to concurrent reads and writes, that’s exacerbated when ...
We have a new feature on the LGF front page: if you’re registered and logged in, the last comment information that shows at the bottom right of each article is now live. Every 15 seconds an Ajax routine checks the last comment for each article on the front page, and ...
If you’re registered and logged in to your account, you can click the icon next to the username in comments to show that commenter’s profile. Now included in the profile information is the “karma,” the sum total of all the “up” ratings Username X received, minus the “down” ratings Username ...
Well, not quite here, but it’s set up and ready to migrate everything over from the current one, the one that’s serving the page you’re reading right now. The old one is a dual core Xeon 3.0, the new one is a quad core Xeon 3.4 with hyperthreading, so the ...
I wavered back and forth for months on this purchase. It seemed overly expensive, and it didn’t have that sleek industrial design look that we’ve come to expect from high end gadgetry. And Steve Jobs said it was a “non-starter.” He should know, right? Well, no. Steve may have a ...
Maintenance notice: at about 6pm Pacific, we’re going to be offline for a short time while the database is moved to a disk partition with more space. It should take only a few minutes, so remember: don’t panic. UPDATE at 10/24/08 6:15:07 pm: Say it loud. We’re back and we’re ...
Unlike the last one, here’s a tech note about something you will notice. Today we were trying to figure out why LGF was responding very slowly, even though traffic was not especially high. At first we suspected the new installation of Mint, but Mint is not the culprit. Digging around ...
A new addition to the site, although you wouldn’t know it unless you look at the source code: Mint, a nicely-designed site statistics package with a slick Ajax interface by Shaun Inman. Quickie review: very simple to install, and started working flawlessly right away with almost no perceptible impact on ...
Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, Javascript, jQuery, Mint, Statistics, Ajax
In the latest tech note that will inevitably become an open thread, still more outdated code has been trimmed, modernized, and tightened up in the LGF Blog Engine templates. The comment entry form that registered users see is now table-free, using floated elements to create a table-like look for the ...
Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, Javascript, jQuery, HTML, Comments, Optimization, CSS
Behind the scenes, the LGF Blog Engine code is being radically reworked, especially in pages with comments. By optimizing the HTML/Javascript/CSS design, we’ve managed to reduce the size (defined as the amount of HTML code it takes to render the comment in your browser) of each individual comment by about ...
Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, Javascript, jQuery, HTML, Comments, Optimization
It’s time to reload the page, as we’ve made structural changes to the HTML and Javascript code to make comments pages significantly smaller and less complex, which should help keep the hamsters from going totally insane.
Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, Javascript, jQuery, HTML, Comments
If you’re using Internet Explorer version 6, you may have noticed the left sidebar seemingly disappearing. It wasn’t really disappearing, it was being pushed down to the bottom of the page when the “Top Rated Links” area opened up. The reason: without getting too technical, Internet Explorer is simply the ...
Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, CSS, HTML, Web Design, Internet Explorer, IE6
If you were having trouble seeing all the comments in longer threads with Firefox 3, reload the page and this should now be fixed. Apparently the Windows version of Firefox has a serious bug with its implementation of the CSS “overflow” property, which we added to a certain page element ...
The latest change behind the scenes is huge, but hopefully you won’t even notice. Ever since LGF began, back in the Paleostinky Era, our main template has been based around a simple HTML table with three columns. No nested tables (gasp!) or anything like that, but in the world of ...
Just to see what happens, we’ve deleted a bunch of the IP blocking rules from our .htaccess file tonight. Since most bloggers don’t watch for (and block) robots and spammers as diligently as Stinky Beaumont does, I suspect we’ve been artificially deflating our traffic numbers in comparison to other blogs. ...
If you’ve been having any of the following problems at LGF: * Login from the main page doesn’t work, but clicking through to an article page and logging in does. * The “top rated links” area just spins and spins and doesn’t open, until you click through to another LGF ...
Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, Javascript, Security, htaccess, mod_rewrite
Stinky Beaumont is project-managing a major code refactoring process this weekend, that we’ve been putting off because it’s painful. We’re talking duplicated code. Global variables. Inconsistent variable naming. Remnants from the days before we started coding smart, instead of just getting it working. It’s not all like this, but the ...
I’m testing out ShareThis, a small Javascript addition that consolidates all the “sharing” functions into one button, replacing that row of links that formerly read “digg, newsvine, reddit,” etc. In addition to looking less cluttered, this has the highly desirable side effect of reducing the download size of the front ...
Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, sharethis, Social Networking, Javascript
We have some new icons in that little information area that shows up at the bottom right of each post; they replace the text links that used to be in that section. The number of comments for each post is now shown with larger digits, followed by the icons: ...
The spinoff links redesign is complete, with styles to match the rest of the site. Gone are the clunky HTML tables, replaced by nice, clean, relatively semantic markup. Stinky Beaumont says they look like the kind of spinoff links his mom would have baked. But he had a weird mom. ...
Tech Note, Icons, Graphics, Design, Spinoff Links, LGF Blog Engine
The icons for rating front page articles, comments, and spinoff links have been redesigned for a more consistent (yet colorful!) look. And of course, once I started tweaking the rating buttons in Fireworks, I had to redesign the Favorites and Report icons as well, to make them match the style. ...
The Most Recent Referrers page now shows the number of referrals from each domain in the past 24 hours, in a column labeled “Count.” The code tries to identify subdomains like ‘hughhewitt.townhall.com’ or ‘environmentalrepublican.blogspot. com’ or ‘pajamasmedia.com/instapundit&rsqu o; and count them separately, but it ain’t perfect. Lots of exceptions to ...
The old workhorse LGF referrers page has a new stripey table look, and new tools behind the curtain to help control referrer spam.
A new addition: LGF front page articles are now categorized, with a limited set of broad categories brazenly lifted from Yahoo’s Buzz categories as described on this page. Deliberate simplicity is often the best solution, but I can easily add more categories as needed. For example, I’ve added “Open” (for ...
The links posted by the LGF community now have their own RSS feed, through Feedburner; here’s the address: http://feeds.feedburner.com/LittleGreenL inks. There’s also a link to this feed in the left sidebar’s “Tools/Info” menu. The feed contains the last 50 links posted, in reverse chronological order. The title of each link ...
LGF, Tech Note, RSS, Syndication, XML, Feedburner, Spinoff Links