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You are here: Home / z-Retired Categories / Previous Site Maintenance / Site Changes… Ahem – er – enhancements!

Site Changes… Ahem – er – enhancements!

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Ok folks, there have been some changes to the site and there will be a few more coming over the next few days.

 

 

We’re now using the Cloudflare CDN to speed up the site for everyone. This should be a very good thing. We’re also now using a better caching mechanism which, coupled with the CDN, should really make things scream.

I’m sure there are twitches to work out.

Some may have noticed that the Recent Comments and Recent Posts widgets were removed. These were taking up huge amounts of processing power that most readers never used. In other words, they sucked the site’s performance down for everyone while benefiting few. The difference on CPU usage before and after was striking, even more so for disk access.

 

I will be updating the core theme over the next few days and hope to have a fix soon for the tablet users trying to use the mobile site. For now, scroll to the very bottom of the page and switch to the Desktop site and it will behave.

 

I will also address a few other odds and ends.

 

Open thread. I will not be here to respond until perhaps later.

Reader Interactions

46Comments

  2. 2.

    Mike J

    The main site has always been pretty fast for me, I just don’t allow third party scripts or frames. YMMV.

  4. 4.

    Alain the site fixer

    @TenguPhule: my reply was to you, sorry I forgot to hit Reply before I clicked the button. Story of my day – can I mention that I crashed/blue screen of death/reboot a Wells Fargo ATM today? At least it returned my card before going kaput – thank you programmer who cares about details!

  5. 5.

    Roger Moore

    One positive sign: my name and email was at the bottom of the post without me having to enter it.

  7. 7.

    The Dangerman

    …they sucked the site’s performance down for everyone while benefiting few.

    So … like Trump children?

  10. 10.

    Yarrow

    The site doesn’t remember my nym or email from post to post. Desktop computer, chrome. Yes the box is checked. It’ll remember it for awhile on a post, but if I’m gone from that tab for too long or if the computer goes to sleep then it’ll forget them again. I opened this post in a new tab and nym and email again are gone.

    Another issue is that the site doesn’t refresh properly. Today saw a new post because I saw the grey arrow on the previous post. Refreshed the home page and new post wasn’t there. Did hard refresh, still not there. Finally got to it by using the arrow on the previous post.

    Forgot to add, I’m still intermittently getting links to Edit or Delete other people’s posts.

    Thanks for your efforts, Alain.

  12. 12.

    Ohio Mom

    Thanks from me too. I can’t imagine how frustrating and tedious it must be to untangle whatever it is that is screwing things up. I admire your tenaciousness.

    When the site wasn’t loading, I was very, very bummed. But now it pops right up. I can wait while the rest is repaired (disappearing nym and email, looking at you).

    Good Luck!

  13. 13.

    p.a.

    still have to enter nym, etc (always use mobile) but it is loading quick. no more html buttons; now have to type even basics like em, i. i’ll never successfully embed a link w/o that particular formatted button.

  15. 15.

    Origuy

    I forget who it was, but someone said that the expiration time on the cookie that saves the nym was only an hour, instead of indefinite.
    It’s saving for me at the moment (Windows 10 Chrome) but we’ll see how long that lasts.

  17. 17.

    NotMax

    Admit that never used the Recent Posts list (nor saw any point to it as all it did was echo the front page) but always paid close attention to the Recent Comments. Surest way to know which already open tabs to refresh. If that is truly kaput, gonna miss it a lot and count it a great loss. Maybe there’s a way to configure it to display only what are recent comments within a truncated time frame? Like maybe only within the past half hour?

  21. 21.

    pattonbt

    I’m having an issue using the site on my iPad (using chrome and safari) where half the page gets cut off by a menu looking blank section. It cuts off the left half of the website. No matter what I try, that pane will not go away. The site works fine on my iPhone and various PCs and laptops.

  22. 22.

    NotMax

    If you want to get rid of something which dynamically tracks stuff and which is redundant, jettison the circular thingie with number of comments. That needlessly repeats what is already in the FP post’s attribution line.

    Also too, the “It has” part of “It has X comments” is unnecessary. Simplify, simplify, simplify.

  24. 24.

    JPL

    I don’t mind being in a place where no one knows my name, but gotta say I’d like comments that were updated without having to put dots in a comment, or linking through John’s twitter feed.

  26. 26.

    Alain the site fixer

    @NotMax: good idea on the circle. It’s part of the theme but I’ll explore. A real concern is then number of plugins we run. This site is a crazy hodge-podge and is heritage.

  30. 30.

    NotMax

    @Alain the site fixer

    Don’t know if it’s feasible, but that’s one reason I suggested a cut-off to truncate the search. It doesn’t necessarily have to be based on time. Search until X amount of data is reached and then stop and display results.

    If it must go, it must, but I for one shall mourn its demise.

  31. 31.

    chris

    The site has mostly worked for me except for the nym thing. But I note the ads still grinding away in the bottom left of my browser, “Waiting for pagead blah blah.” Etc.

    Linux Mint/Chrome

  32. 32.

    M4

    Thanks for all you do Alain!

    @Alain the site fixer: comments close after x amount of time on a post; rewrite query for posts younger than x, join on comments, get newest y.

    Also, my RSS notifications are coming in like 30+ minutes late nowadays on IFTTT. Not happening for other sites.

  33. 33.

    M4

    @JPL: is that why people are leaving periods as comments?

    Hard refresh works for me, but obviously that shouldn’t have to be necessary.

  36. 36.

    Percysowner

    Hey as long as you keep an RSS feed, I’m golden. Yeah, my Nym keeps getting logged out, but I don’t comment that much and I can always relog in.

  37. 37.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    @Alain the site fixer: I suggested ages ago that we needed a rewrite of the Recent Comments to use a small table that just keeps links to that day’s comments and is pruned back to 20 by a daily cron. Unfortunately, I’m not enough of a programmer to do it. Nor have I ever stayed at a Holiday Inn Express.

    I use the Recent Comments frequently, too. Perhaps you could feed them to a dedicated page for those of us who do use them. So long as they’re off the front page and the posts, the hit will be greatly reduced.

    The nym cookies were actually expiring a half hour after the last post. I tried manually setting a longer expiration, but WP reset the expiration on my next comment. I was hoping someone would remember seeing that if you dropped back in when I wasn’t around.

  42. 42.

    frosty

    Gee, I used recent comments almost every time I got onto the site. It was the best way to figure out a thread was dead, instead of mostly dead.

    Sorry to have contributed to slowing down the site for everyone!

  43. 43.

    Alain the site fixer

    @Major Major Major Major: I think we need to re-engineer WP. We’d need to write the comment twice, once to a small table that’s constantly overwritten. Doing queries on the main comment table is the problem. But really,the main problem is we use WP in an odd way. Sites that have comments require logins and that would solve 75% of comment issues. But no one wants to change.

  44. 44.

    Dev Null

    Esteemed Site Maintainer Alain,

    Three questions for you:

    1. how does one find a specific commenter comment and/or a list of comments by a specific commenter? I tried the search function on my nym, and “no posts matched your search criteria”. (e.g. at the beginning of the week, a commenter mentioned a book I’d like to read; I don’t remember commenter nym or author or title, but I responded to the comment, so if I could backtrack my comments I should be able to find the comment and book title.)

    2. Is there a manual somewhere that explains comment formatting? I see your mention of wordpress above, I can probably find the wordpress formatting manual if the BJ version is vanilla wordpress. Still, a link on the sidebar wouldn’t cost much.

    3. One of my utterly benign (not even one expletive!) comments went into moderation a day or two ago. I could edit the comment (held in moderation), but I couldn’t save my edited comment no matter how many times I clicked the SAVE button. Is that a bug, an intended feature, or just a glitch that isn’t worth debugging?

    Not suggesting that it’s worth fixing if it’s a bug, just passing along the experience.

    4. (of 3) What about a post sometime detailing which sites / trackers / etc SHOULD NOT BE BLOCKED for optimal viewing experience. And posting a permanent link to that post on the sidebar?

    5. (of 3) Any reason we can’t have the formatting toolbar when we go to re-edit a pending comment (during the 5 minute grace period we’re allowed to modify a posted comment)?

    I apologize for asking simple questions that I am 99.99% certain have already been asked many many times… and I apologize for my ignorance. Long ago – circa 2005 – I supported a corporate website, and hooboy were the users a pain in the arse, so let me say that I appreciate the work you put into keeping BJ up and running (and I am sure that everyone else agrees with me on this point if no others). I sympathize with anyone (like you) who has to deal with idiots like me.

    The problem with making a system foolproof is that fools are so unaccountably clever.

    A couple of observations:

    1. BJ is loading very very slowly this morning in comparison to other sites, e.g. mojo. I use chrome; BJ is loading slowly in my primary persona, in an incognito window, and in a guest persona. I use uMatrix and Disconnect ad blockers (sorry!); as best I can tell I haven’t blocked anything critical to the operation of the site. (No ad blockers in guest mode in any case.)

    2. The front page seems very stripped down … lots of white space at the top and side. In a guest persona window I see an advert at the top, the BJ graphic below it, and Quick Links, the search icon, and FB and twitter icons. Guessing you’re playing with the site, so just FYI.

  45. 45.

    Dev Null

    Further to “running slow”, I saw a couple of typos in my comment immediately above, and clicked on “click to edit”. Took a minute for the outline of the edit window to come up, and after two more minutes, with only the outline of the edit window (and, surprisingly, the “close” button) showing, I gave up.

    I’m running on an 8-thread relatively recent (3yo) Intel mobile cpu with 32G of mainstore. Looks like I have about 59-61 open chrome processes launched. The load gauge is below 1, so whatever’s going on, it isn’t resource starvation on my laptop.

  46. 46.

    Aleta

    Alain, the Recent Comments were useful for me too. If it helps, the Recent posts part is less necessary since one can scroll down the home page to see the list of recent posts almost as easily. Especially when FPers format their longer posts so the length goes below the fold.

Comments are closed.