Categories. On the right. On the category icons. In the trees. They're everywhere! Eeeeee!!!
...
Sorry.
Fixed a couple of problems. The MT->Minx transfer marked posts as unpublished under their individual categories (sort of, it's complicated), so they showed on the main blog page, but not on the category pages. And a bug in the recent comments query meant that recent comments didn't show up at all on category pages.
Now, back to being driven crazy by this darn editor.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
03:57 AM
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Friday, March 30
Timing Is Everything
70ms for the main page without comments. 150ms with comments. 96 comments displayed (including the Recent Comments thingy).
Hmm. A bit disappointing, considering this is the fastest hardware I'm likely to get this year.
I just hope that Ace, who has 200+ comments on individual posts, doesn't try to do inline comments.
Update: Well, it's not broken, just a bit poky at certain tasks. An individual entry page takes 5.7ms (elapsed time) if you remove the Recent Comments. 2.9ms of that is the SQL queries. The forum page sans sidebar takes 54ms to list 20 posts; 6ms for the queries. (The query times are for cached queries; uncached takes longer in elapsed time, but that doesn't come into CPU efficiency of the application code.)
If I tweak the forum listing to include the body of the post, it takes exactly the same amount of time to within the limits of precision of the built-in timer. Which shouldn't be surprising I guess; all the data processing is done whether the template needs it or not, and Python's string processing is very efficient. It does point to where I need to concentrate my attention, though.
Update: Adding the planned [topics] selector and the associated [topic] data tags reduces the time for a forum page sans sidebar to 13ms. The sidebar adds another 13ms. Extending it from 20 to 50 topics pushes the time out to 42ms: about 500μs per topic, compared to about 2ms per entry.
1
Ace and the Jawas are the smoke test. If you can survive them, you can survive anything.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Saturday, March 31 2007 12:16 AM (+rSRq)
2
Both Ace and the Jawas are already running an early version of the Minx comment system, because MT comments folded up under the strain. The full version has a lot more features and so is slower, but it isn't enormously slower.
Here's the result from an Ace post with 295 comments on the old system:
Processing 0.13, elapsed 0.1542 seconds. 15 queries taking 0.0494 seconds, 304 records returned. Page size 185 kb. Powered by Minx 0.7 alpha.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, March 31 2007 03:58 AM (PiXy!)
3
Did you ever puzzle out what was causing the input lag in high comment count posts? There have been a lot of 200+ posts over there lately, and the lag gets really noticable beyond that point.
Posted by: Will at Saturday, March 31 2007 11:38 AM (olS40)
If you entered something in New Comments Thingy, it wouldn't update the main page or the entry page, but it updates the New Comments Thingy page right away... Unless it still has caching enabled... Which would affect everyone but me, because it doesn't cache if you're logged in...
ops:
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, March 31 2007 12:08 PM (kdEVa)
Well I had noticed a problem with the comment count on the main page not updating (new posts show 0 comments for quite a while), but what I was actually referring to is a noticable lag between entering keystrokes and the letters appearing on the screen in the text box of the New Comments Thingy.
I've been watching the CPU Usage in the Task Manager while typing a comment on a couple threads over at AoSHQ, and it spikes when you begin typing a comment in a thread that already has about 150+ comments. If you just keep typing away furiously, none of the text will appear until after you've paused and given it time to catch up.
The more comments, the worse the problem gets. I don't know if it's a problem with the comments system or maybe IE (or other browsers) interacting with the comment system. Several people have remarked on it over at Ace's, so it can't be just me. Try his recent open thread and see if you observe the same thing happening.
Posted by: Will at Saturday, March 31 2007 04:43 PM (SOx9v)
No, I don't get that at all. But I use Firefox. Let me try it in IE...
Gak!!! That's horrible! What the hell?!
I'll definitely look into that. But the editor itself works fine on IE, so I don't know why it would suddenly blow up on long threads. It shouldn't make any difference.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, March 31 2007 04:55 PM (PiXy!)
Well, you're certainly right. It only seems to happen in IE, and only on longer threads. I even tried the "view page in IE" plugin I have installed in Firefox, and it worked just fine there.
Very weird indeed.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, March 31 2007 05:06 PM (PiXy!)
[me] picks up the author of the current post or comment. [you] gets your username if you're logged in, or the name you used on your most recent comment if it's still retained by the session code, or the text specified, or if all else fails, "you".
It appears it was my fault. I have some rather rigorous filtration rules set up with Proxomitron to shut off various aspects of Javascript that are often abused, and one of them must have come into conflict with your editing stuff.
With Proxomitron disabled, the editing buttons are back.
By the way, I have to confess that I tried an experiment with my previous post. I wanted to see if you permitted me to put an "embed" statement in a comment, and it turns out that you didn't. Now that I'm using your full comment doohickey, I'm going to try it again and see what happens:
So the embed shows up on preview; let's see if it comes through after it's posted.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Thursday, March 29 2007 12:40 PM (+rSRq)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Thursday, March 29 2007 12:41 PM (+rSRq)
8
I have a full-bore SGML parser that unpacks comments, strips unwanted tags and attributes, balances unbalanced tags, and repacks everything. It runs dynamically every time a page is generated, and accounts for up to 70% of the page generation time.
On the other hand, it works.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, March 29 2007 01:02 PM (PiXy!)
Posted by: [me] at Thursday, March 29 2007 01:43 PM (CglRh)
11
Nope, that wasn't it... I'll learn this somehow and Steven is right, YOU are smarter 'n me!
Posted by: GM Roper at Thursday, March 29 2007 01:44 PM (CglRh)
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You can only put it in the body of the comment, not in the name field.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, March 29 2007 01:56 PM (PiXy!)
13
Okay my eyes are crossing. I've been silly enough to volunteer to do some web stuff for a group I belong to. I was simply going to help the webmaster... but as soon as I volunteered, he said "gee thanks now I can get out of this". I've been looking at html and php for the last week... I haven't done any dynamic coding before this - so I must say, I am very very impressed with everything you've done.
Now to check out the taggies and see what happens...
Teresa you
Posted by: Teresa at Thursday, March 29 2007 02:36 PM (gsbs5)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:05 AM
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Tuesday, March 27
BBCodarama
One of the features I've built in to Minx is BBCode support. You can use this in both posts and comments. At least, you should be able to use it in comments. We'll soon see.
Got my first piece of spam since I moved across to mee.nu. Took a look at the automated spam filter, and the cupboard was bare.
Minx uses two spam filters: A conventional URL/IP filter fed from a honeypot system, and the statistical system called Snark that I wrote late in 2005 to deal with trackback spam at munu. Snark worked really well, getting rid of 99.8% of trackback spam with almost no false positives, until I accidentally clobbered its data files during the DDoS attacks. New Snark uses MySQL, of course, making it less likely for me to accidentally clobber it.
Unfortunately, (a) the honeypot isn't catching any flies and (b) one spam isn't enough to feed a statistical anti-spam engine.
I think, first, I need to fix the honeypot, and second, I need to fix the comment moderation screen. A Pixy's work is never done. Particularly when said Pixy embarks on major web development projects...
S*P*A*M is only POPULAR in Hawaii. On the shelves, its a fairly decent (if oh-so-ordinary) product. In a blog-site its a pain in the kiester! Good work Pixy. I'm waiting with bated breath!
Gads, I love playing with the comment thingy!!!
Posted by: GM Roper at Thursday, March 22 2007 09:38 AM (S60yG)
2
That looked like an explosion at the font factory.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Thursday, March 22 2007 10:31 AM (+rSRq)
3
Yeah, sometimes he goes a little overboard with the editor.
Meanwhile, I've fixed the comment moderation screen, and put up the mee.nu smilies server. Still not sure what happened to the honeypot.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, March 22 2007 11:03 AM (PiXy!)
4
One other thing you can do is to create a field near "Name" which must be left empty for the post to work and obscure it with a CSS trick. For the benefit of those with obsolete browsers, add an explanation elsewhere. You can also blacklist those who enter something into the empty field.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Thursday, March 22 2007 07:00 PM (9imyF)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, March 22 2007 07:24 PM (PiXy!)
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I finally gave up and used JavaScript to rewrite the comment-submission URL after the page finishes loading. If someone tries to use the URL that's embedded in the HTML, my log-scanner blocks their IP address at the firewall.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, March 22 2007 07:43 PM (9Nz6c)
7
Only problem with that is users who have Javascript disabled.
I'm expecting to use a combination of honeypot tricks (honeypot sites, hidden fields, URL rewriting) along with statistical analysis (the advantage of running hundreds or thousands of blogs on a common database is that you can see trends much more easily).
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, March 22 2007 09:57 PM (PiXy!)
"Yeah, sometimes he goes a little overboard with the editor."
Not always!!! Harrumph!
Posted by: GM Roper at Thursday, March 22 2007 11:00 PM (S60yG)
9
The latest spam to get through your shields landed on a post about spam. I think my irony meter is smoking.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Friday, March 23 2007 06:46 PM (+rSRq)
10
Not being html, php, java, or otherwise web proficient (I know enough to get myself into trouble :-) ) I bow to you Pixy for undertaking this incredible job. Whew!
I just spent over 3 hours today working with someone to update 1 single, poorly written, web page... sheesh! It's a group I belong to, and I had suggested that we get a pro to redo the page - I'm getting static from IDIOTS who won't lift a finger, about spending money for nothing. ARG!!!
So once again I say - All Hail Pixy! You're doing one hell of a job!
Posted by: Teresa at Friday, March 23 2007 07:49 PM (gsbs5)
Well, if there's no login button, you can't even fail to login, so that'll do.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 11 2007 08:27 PM (uj4NK)
3
Login: Ozguru
Password: Ardunno
Hmmm. Didn't work real well. Maybe I should use my real password if I can remember what it is.
Hmmm. Maybe I could edit the cookies in the browser and find it that way....
Posted by: Ozguru at Tuesday, March 13 2007 08:08 AM (0UJXJ)
We have RSS feeds now. I'm not sure how good they are, because I, uh, adapted the code from elsewhere, but they validate, and they actually work.
Which means that formatting tags also work.
Which means... that I have to document those little buggers as well.
I've also printed a copy of the RSS 2.0 spec so that I can make a nice clean feed template - because it is just another template.
Update: Okay, clean RSS 2.0 is available now. Again, it both validates and works (tested in Firefox, Thunderbird, Opera and Google Reader) so have fun.
Update: And now we have Atom 1.0 as well!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:23 PM
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ops: 
![[Valid RSS]](/images/valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed")
![[Valid Atom 1.0]](/images/valid-atom.png "Validate my Atom 1.0 feed")
