More baking, less frying
, Issue 158; 08 Dec 2005; last modified 08 Oct 2010
More back-end fiddling.
Although using FastCGI was a dramatic improvement, it's clear that I'm still doing too much frying and not enough baking.
So I've fiddled again (in ways that are still supposed to be invisible). Essay comments are now baked instead of being fried. My only excuse is that frying was easy. The related topics links are still fried, and they should probably be baked too, but I'm not going to bother in the short term, I don't think.
Comments
Cross your fingers. Things are broken if this comment doesn't appear.
Success! Sweet.
Do you have mod_security enabled and blocking the worst of the referrer spammers? I knew I was blocking a fair number, but until someone mentioned numbers and prompted me to add mine up I wouldn't have guessed that it was just a hair under 100,000 requests for the first seven days of December. Frying gets a lot more expensive and frustrating when most of your customers are just phoning in a prank order, and don't ever come in to pick it up.
Not strictly relevant but "Self-reference" at least.
Your sidebar doesn't display in my browser (Firefox 1.0.7 on XP). It pops up briefly as the page is displayed then disappears as the page is layed out finally. It's there in the source, of course. I haven't looked into the CSS or anything for clues yet.
I think it disappeared a few weeks ago but not really sure.
Screenshot at:
http://www.edavies.nildram.co.uk/temp/2005/12/ndw-screenshot.png
Ed, there's a "Style: 1 Col/2 Col" header in the upper-right corner. If you click on "2 Col", does the sidebar return?
It does. Oops, how embarrassing. I looked at how you and Tim stored the style choice in a cookie ages ago but never looked at/didn't remember the 1col/2col stuff. Must have accidently clicked on 1 Col on the way out of a page or something. Have you considered putting the navigation info across the bottom of the page in 1 column mode?
Reuters Health has been all-baked (hundreds of thousands of pages) since 2000, with the exception of search results (duh), account creation (double duh), and the home page (which uses server-side includes). Makes it fast fast fast.
Well, almost. When we had ads, they appeared only on the few hundred pages that were accessible without a login at the particular time, and that distinction was made by flipping server-side includes on and off for those pages. We haven't had any ads for years, though.
Good programming guys ;)