TagsTagsA new feature tonight: the Tag Storm, a massive page consisting of every LGF tag from my front page posts in “tag cloud” format, linked to our TagViewer. The recurring themes really ... uh ... stick out.
Hey, anyone notice how much better LGF is behaving? The hamsters haven’t even hiccuped all week, and response time is greatly improved overall. The Safari browser has a cool Web Inspector that shows all kinds of stats about a web page as it loads, and it reports that loading the ...
Here’s an open thread for Monday morning; the latest tweaks to the database layer have made a big difference today, as traffic did its usual Monday morning surge. According to mytop, more than 70% of our database requests are being served out of the cache, which makes our MySQL server much ...
After scratching my head, pulling out my hair, consulting the Necronomicon, and Googling like a fiend for terms like “persistent connections” and “query cache bug,” I’ve made some changes to the LGF Blog Engine database layer that seem to have greatly improved performance. I didn’t want to say anything ...
It’s the return of the son of the dreaded midday open thread... New feature in your “My Favorites” page: you can specify a list of tags as a filter. Right now it works as an “OR” filter; if any of the tags match, the favorite shows up in the list. I’ll ...
Lots of work behind the scenes today on the tag auto-completion feature in your “My Favorites” page. With some more Ajax goodies installed, working with tags is much more responsive. * If you add a new tag, or delete an existing tag completely from all your favorites, you’ll now see the ...
Another cool enhancement to the Favorites feature tonight: when entering tags for an item, you’ll now see a list of ‘auto-complete’ suggestions, pulled from your current tags. You can select a suggestion either by hitting Return (which picks the first suggestion if there’s more than one) or by clicking the ...
Saturday morning is almost a memory, and here’s an open thread... I’ll be digging around and refining the “Favorites” code today, so if by any chance an LGF feature doesn’t seem to be working right for you, refresh the page completely. Some browsers like to hang on to their cache so ...
The LGF enhancement du jour: a very helpful tool for organizing your saved favorites, a tool that we will call “tags.” Because everyone else does. In your My Favorites page, each saved favorite can now have its own series of tags (or keywords). Click the “Tags” link at lower right of ...
Since the original announcement has scrolled down the page I’m beginning to get emails from people asking, “Hey, what’s with all those little red hearts?” (You need to be registered and logged in to see them.) That’s our new Favorites feature, that saves links to any front page entry, spinoff link, ...
An open thread just to test the new Favorites feature, before formally announcing... UPDATE at 3/20/08 9:18:55 pm: It’s alive! Here’s the idea: next to each front page entry, spinoff link, and comment, you’ll now see a little red heart if you’re logged in. Click that red heart and it turns green, to ...
I’m coding away like mad after reviewing usability and security for the new “Favorites” feature, soon to be unveiled. If you’re a registered lizard, this feature will let you easily add any LGF entry, link (from ‘top links’ or ‘spinoff links’), or comment to a personalized list of favorites that ...
Today we have two enhancements to the spinoff links and top links: * Your user icon (or tiny football, if you haven’t uploaded an icon) is now a link to your profile page. * The time and date of the link are now shown in a “relative” format, for example, “16 minutes ...
Wee-oo wee-oo! Page reload alert! Wee-oo wee-oo! Yes, it’s time to reload the page again, as we install the fix for another annoying bug in our Ajax comments. To be completely sure you’re up to date, you may also want to clear your browser cache before hitting the refresh button. Non-techies may ...
LGF, Technical Info, Javascript, Ajax, jQuery, Comments, Metadata
If you’ve been plagued with a message about an “unresponsive script” when you load LGF, I’m happy to report that the problem is fixed. Non-techies may now proceed to the open thread ... For the techlizards amongst us, here’s the explanation, because it may help someone diagnose a similar problem. I didn’t ...
LGF, Technical Info, Javascript, Ajax, jQuery, Events, window.unload
I’ve just discovered a problem that was causing serious slowdowns at LGF, and fixed it. As soon as I implemented the fix, the site started reacting much faster. So here’s an open thread... (Geek note: I needed to add an index to one of our MySQL database tables, for a very common ...
That typing delay problem I mentioned earlier, that showed up in the comment posting form and the link posting forms? It’s history. The excruciatingly technical reason, because some geek somewhere may benefit from it: Turns out that some browsers are much slower at performing the Javascript innerHTML() function than others. I mean, ...
This morning I’m working on a problem some lizards have reported, in which there’s a long delay while typing into the comment posting form. I’m flying on instruments here, because I can’t duplicate the problem on any of my testing machines (I think I need a really under-powered PC for ...
The date range setting of the LinkViewer has been improved tonight. Now there’s only one field instead of two; when you click in the field (or click the little calendar icon) the popup calendar lets you select two dates — the “from” and “to” dates — and automatically reloads the ...
LGF, Technical Info, Javascript, Ajax, Spinoff Links, LinkViewer
After bogging down quite a bit today with a flood of traffic, I’m trying a new technique (new for LGF anyway) to cut the size of the files that have to be downloaded in order to display our pages, and improve the page loading speed for all our visitors. Last ...
LGF, Technical Info, Javascript, CSS, gzip, Apache, mod_gzip
In the “Top Rated Links” area, you can now set how many links you want to display, from 5 to 25, in increments of 5. This value is saved in a cookie, along with the current category, the number of days, and the state of the link area (visible or ...
LGF, Technical Info, Javascript, Ajax, Spinoff Links, jQuery
One of the issues I considered when implementing the ‘Top-Rated Links’ feature was: how far back should the feature look? A day, two days, more? After some experimentation I settled on one day as a reasonable interval. But this meant that comment threads and conversations would disappear from the listings, ...
LGF, Technical Info, Javascript, Ajax, Spinoff Links, jQuery
With more than 10,000 links in the database already, less than a month after launch, it looks like the “spinoff links” feature is pleasing to the ravening bloodthirsty hounds of the lizard army. Since the click counter was developed and launched on January 16, we’ve recorded 122,200 total clicks on ...
LGF, Technical Info, Javascript, Ajax, Spinoff Links, jQuery
OK, call it “ECMAScript” if you want to get technical. But in the past week I’ve managed to trim more than 50K out of the Javascript/ECMAScript, by taking better advantage of the jQuery Library. Another huge savings: I switched away from our old Model T tooltip script to a jQuery plugin ...
LGF, Technical Info, Javascript, Ajax, Spinoff Links, jQuery
Several readers suggested that I show how many times the spinoff links are clicked, as another measure of their popularity and/or brilliance and/or enticement factor, so tonight we’re proud to announce that so it is written, so it is done. In our spinoff links, next to the domain name (on the ...
LGF, Technical Info, Javascript, Ajax, Spinoff Links, jQuery