Tweaking the updates

Written By: - Date published: 3:45 am, April 30th, 2008 - 17 comments
Categories: admin - Tags: , , , , ,

Yesterday’s site issues were due to a combination of inadequate Expires (causing a lot more files being transmitted) and the web-crawlers grabbing the updated site.

It blew out the memory. I’ve limited the simultaneous sessions to prevent that until I get more RAM. Bandwidth usage for this month is indicating this would be a wise precaution to speed page delivery, even without the site updates.

I’ve done a few tweaks to the front page of the site to speed finding the current state of play and balance out the blogroll. Because of the volume of posts and comments, I’ve increased the size of the latest of both. This means you will be able to see who is talking across posts more easily.

The access to the older posts are now inside ‘Archives’ at the top menu.

There are  a number of features that I’ll be turning on over the next week or so as things settle down. But none of those should structurally change the site. The back-end changes are quite effective.

Let me know of the gripes and suggestions either as comments in this post or e-mail (but avoid the political sniping). I will do what is feasible, while keeping a close eye on that bandwidth and memory. Hopefully this is the last of the upgrade issues apart from the disappearing IE comments box that I still have to fix.

Lynn

17 comments on “Tweaking the updates ”

  1. higherstandard 1

    Thanks Lynn

    Site is working and looking fine on my OS.

  2. r0b 2

    The new layout (especially the long list of latest comments) is excellent. Thanks!

  3. Matthew Pilott 3

    IE 6 – your favourite – is happy (some improvements since monday too, thanks).

    (cap – shrieking lamb – I guess Jodie Foster is about somewhere…)

  4. lprent 4

    rOb: I thought you’d appreciate that. But I also thought it’d be an assitance in the ‘exclusive’ relationship between ‘sod and Billy that has been amusing Tane.

    Matthew: Does IE6 do the same as IE7 with the comment entry box? You put in a comment, submit it, and the LeaveReply downwards goes away. Some seconds later it reappears briefly and correctly. But a nibble later everything below the Leave Reply and Login disappears again. If it does then the same fix should work for both.

  5. Matthew Pilott 5

    Test

    [Matt, you and a couple of the others are sometimes getting caught by moderation. Not sure why but I’m sure it’ll sort itself out. SP]
    [lprent: I’ve put a d4j suspect into moderation until I have time to look at them closely. Matt has replied to a suspect name so he gets caught in it as well.]

  6. Matthew Pilott 6

    After posting on IE6, I have to refresh for the ‘leave a reply’ dialogue box to reappear.

    The “type the two words:” text and the field for entry below the text is sometimes displaced (sitting below the reCaptcha box), but that doesn’t seem to affect the validation of the comment.

    I’ll come back this evening and check with IE7 when I’m at home, unless someone else can do so in the meantime.

  7. Matthew Pilott 7

    Actually, paying closer attention this time – I post, the comment box flickers up and then is gone – it’s pretty much straight after posting that it flashes up and disappears.

  8. lprent 8

    Thats ok – that is exactly what I see in IE7 as well. I don’t get the reCaptcha displacement, but I’m pretty sure that the IE7 fix will also cure the same ills in IE6.

    The trident rendering engine for both doesn’t like the amount of css position:relative that is getting done to put the left sidebar on the left. I have a fix that I’ve tested in IE7. But I’ll have to put a special [if IE] in the footer code, because that bit of css makes the better browsers look ugly.

  9. zANavAShi 9

    Test IE 6.0.3790.0 on Win2k3….

    [lprent: cool. Looks like the alpha theme is good apart from that one little quirk]

  10. lprent 10

    Trying something different. Removing the javascript magic on the posting

  11. lprent 11

    Ummm that is a LOT faster. It looks like they’ve fixed the origional post problem that caused me to put it on.

  12. lprent 12

    That should also remove a lot of the refreshes

  13. Matthew Pilott 13

    IE7.0.6000

  14. Matthew Pilott 14

    None of the IE6 captcha issues here.

  15. lprent 15

    I just changed the comment post method.
    It looks like

    a. the wordpress 2.5.1 conflicted with the K2 delayed updater (and slowed it down)

    b. the origional problem at the delayed updater was ment to cope with has gone away. Either wordpress update, or the move to linux.

    c. This will test if the page refreshes for your messages that I can see on another browser show up when I press Submit

  16. lprent 16

    Yep. You won’t need to use refresh after submitting a comment.

    Stangely, that will take a load off the server. The images are cached, and one of the main calls on the server was checking images when you pressed refresh after submit

  17. lprent 17

    Still having problems with some of the Design parts of the system.

    I’ve also shifted to safari for Windoze. This is a seriously good browser

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