Linkstew

FYI: Comments are disabled until I figure out how to stop the spam and/or whether or not comments are even useful. If you have opinions and/or tips on how to stop spam in wordpress, drop me an email.

As if the echoing silence wasn't evidence enough, I think this is the most salient example of how dusty it got in here:

"There are comments in moderation (1,158) »"
-- Linkstew.org's WordPress

I just noticed there's a GeoPlugin for WordPress. I suddenly have the urge to go annotate all my old posts with geographic information.

ongoing: It's Not Dangerous - Ten Reasons Why Blogging is Good For Your Career

This article makes excellent points.

Why your Moveable Type blog must die.

This is funny, but it also made me feel a little guilty. It almost makes me want to impose an even stricter QA process on my writing.

Puzzleblog

Now this is neat, and should be a good way to sharpen my Scrabble skills.

I just got a piece of spam with the subject "blog," so of course it jumped out at me as I was scanning my inbox, and of course I opened it. Man, that's just dirty pool.

So Berkeley Blogs.org, the Berkeley blog directory that I maintain, kind of went away for a little while, but now it's back and better than before. Now Berkeley Bloggers can and submit their own link, and edit their entry, and include a short description of themselves or their site. This is great because it makes it massively easier for me to maintain the list, and makes it easier for Berkeley Bloggers to get listed, too.

So if you've got anything to do with Berkeley, past or present, (and you want to be listed in the directory), head on over to Berkeley Blogs.org and hit "Add Link." And if you've got any questions or suggestions, let me know.

Discussion and Citation in the Blogosphere...

This article was somewhat interesting, but it didn't seem particularly profound. I also read most of the articles this article links. I kind of felt like there should be a meta-article written about the article, though. As it was, it felt like the author ignored how what he was saying was just another example of what he was describing.

Anti-war slogan coined, repurposed and Googlewashed... in 42 days

This is a cool story of blogging and its effects on Google. I really like the possibilities of using google as a linguistic tool, and this sort of behavior is actually data if that's your goal.

Yet more evidence that I have altogether too much time on my hands:

When a reader clicks on the "Random" link over there on the side, they're taken to a random entry in the stew. But as it is, I have no way of knowing which entry a reader randomly sees. When I notice a random hit, I often wonder about which entry a reader randomly ended up at.

But today, I saw someone click the random link, and then saw them follow several links from that random page to other pages within the stew. And, having too much time on my hands, I took destinations and triangulated back to which random entry the links had originated from.

I really need to toss an image that includes the random entry number being displayed as an http parameter on that random page. Y'know, a nice, simple, <img src="random_tracker.gif?noid=entrynumber"> would do the trick.

I finally got around to fixing Linkstew's slowness.

So what was wrong?

I started by putting in timing code to see how long each piece of the page was taking to render, and I found that all of the hang up was in building the central list of posts. Further poking revealed that it was the sql query itself that was taking anywhere from 4 to 10 seconds to execute (depending on mysql's mood), and this was the source of the long loading delays the site had been exhibiting.

Now, I hadn't changed that query in months, so I still can't account for why Linktew suddenly got so slow last month. But using the "explain" SQL command, I was pretty quickly able to deduce the source of my problem:

My comments table has a column that keeps track of the post number that any given comment is associated with. However, the entry number column (which I was joining my posts table to my comments table on) wasn't indexed. So to display the comment count for any given entry, my query had to do a full, unindexed scan of my comments table in order to find out how many comments any given entry had. Multiply this by every entry on Linkstew, and I had one expensive operation on my hand.

A simple little alter table comments add index ... fixed the problem good, and the query that was taking 4 to 10 seconds now takes 0.15 to 0.30 seconds.

Which means that Linkstew is once again faster than Fury.com, and all is again right in the world. ;-)

(I'm just trying to make Kevin's life difficult. He knows I love him.)