Slashdot Mirror
Achievements and Optimizations
Ok, Optimizations. These really only affect the Index2 beta users and Firefox users. You should really be in one of these 2 groups.
- CSS Sprites: Vlad combined a number of our chrome images. Vroom used the same technique to combine our top 25 topic icons into a single image. The top 25 icons appear on 60% of our stories, and the chrome images appear on every page load. These 2 changes dropped perhaps 20 requests from a typical fresh page load. That should be a measurable performance increase for a lot of people.
- Library Purge: Scott removed the last remnants of the YUI library. This was THE library to use for AJAX a few years ago, but as of now, we have totally ported to jQuery. The last 2 bits that used YUI were some animation bits, and the discussion2 threshold changing floating widget thing. Porting those 2 things to jQuery let us pull several hundred k of JS from our includes. This let us trim another 85k from our compressed JS transfers. We've cut the JS included on Slashdot in half in the last month.
- Varnish: Jamie installed varnish as a reverse proxy behind the F5 but before our apache. Really this won't be a significant performance improvement for now. We use a complex system of static pages to cache the most read content on the site, but varnish will at last let us deprecate that ancient system for something much simpler. We'll be experimenting with this more over the week, but the only real change for most cases is that most of our static content can be served w/o the latency of NFS. Not a big deal really, but it's something. But when we purge out the old caching system, a lot of things will be a lot easier to maintain and debug.
- CDN: We're probably going to test a CDN this week. The performance gains will be minor, but it will let us move 50 megabits of traffic off our main router and distribute that globally. It sure won't hurt.
A note on Achievements. We launched this as an april fools day joke. We're glad many of you got it. We had great fun with it. But achievements are actually a real, working system. And they serve a purpose. Most of the major bits of functionality on Slashdot have a corresponding achievement. Posting a Journal? Getting a Story Accepted? Being Moderated Up? Using all of your Mod Points up? While many achievements are silly jokes: getting the first block of achievements is essentially a tutorial. And getting some of the more complicated achievements would be a useful indicator for a quality contributor to the site. The heavy lifting on this was done by Chris Brown.
We're also experimenting with a thing we call 'Auto-More'. When you get to the end of the page, a second block of articles will be added to your index. The cool thing is that this means we can serve a smaller selection of stories on the main page request. Since 2/3rds of you never read past story #6, that means that you will get your page a little faster. But 10% or so of you get to the bottom of the page. And you will transparently be given more content. We're doing a bunch of logs to see if this works out. It's just an experiment tho, we may kill it if there is a problem. I think it will eventually be connected to the pause/play function available to logged in Index2 users.
This week we intend to start rolling out the Index2 beta to a very small number of firefox users. A good number of you won't notice. Some of you will tho. You won't hurt our feelings by disabling the thing immediately but I hope you give it a shot. It's great on Firefox. It has a few bugs on Safari. It will work on Chrome as soon as Google gets a Mac port out (Hint hint!). As for IE... well, you'll keep the old system for a few more weeks, but you're only like 14% of our users, and you keep shrinking.
Ok, back to work. You too.
Let's just hope these new optimizations don't href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/technologynews/5105
The heavy lifting on this was done by Chris Brown.
I don't care if he can code, any man that would hit a woman is no man at all. You don't deserve Rihanna, you piece of shit, and if I ever catch you out on the street without your bodyguards - your ass is grass my friend.
Either that or they need to create some way for readers to weigh in on what should make it to the main pages.
Oh well, we can only wish.
It's great on Firefox. It has a few bugs on Safari. It will work on Chrome as soon as Google gets a Mac port out (Hint hint!). As for IE... well, you'll keep the old system for a few more weeks, but you're only like 14% of our users, and you keep shrinking.
Er...havn't you forgotten something. A lot of us are Sooo nerdy we use Opera
Smivs on the intertubes!
IE usage down to 14% seems like a major story, even for a tech heavy site like Slashdot. It would be interesting to see trends of browsers on /. over time. And maybe even OS stats?
btw, Taco, I use noscript to turn off the Javascript on /., mostly because Firefox 2 on my Solaris machine is just too slow (and there's really no hope of getting Firefox 3 working -- I'd have to compile half of Gnome in library upgrades). I can accept some of the UI weirdness (like the gray triangle on top of every story on the main page), but I hope you don't make Javascript a requirement for viewing /. That would be painful!
"Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown
The new user page is ugly and less useful than the old one. It takes information that used to be on the main user page and makes me click on a second link in order to see it.
I respect that website maintainers like to add new shiny things to the website every once in a while, but for God's sake, don't take away functionality in the process.
no life
create some way for readers to weigh in
Like the Firehose?
How about adding Unicode support so that posts aren't often filled with random garbage when commenters assume one of the major technical sites on the internet should be able to handle curved quotation marks. Never mind when someone tries to write a word/post in Japanese or any other non-English language.
Sturgeon was an optimist.
Firehose?!? I know what that means and I have no time for you GNAA trolls!
Anyhow, I am still trying to figure out what the Green/Black thing means.
Is anyone else seeing +/- on all the story headers?
I think they really should just go with the GGP suggestion and fire those guys.
How about employing someone to proof-read your posts and check the links?
Are you serious? The lack of proof-read is what makes this place Slashdot! ;-)
Just annecdotal, since I don't have numbers to back it up, but comment pages seem a LOT faster with the cut over from YUI. The lil floating comment bar used to be PAINFULLY slow in letting me scroll through.
Excellent.
How about adding Unicode support so that posts aren't often filled with random garbage when commenters assume one of the major technical sites on the internet should be able to handle curved quotation marks.
They tried that once before. But some idiots found some Unicode characters that could be used to reverse the display of Slashdot and spoof scores. See my previous post on this topic
To improve story quality they just need to get rid of kdawson and ScuttleMonkey.
Meh. The kdawson script is just ScuttleMonkey v2. Obviously, not only did they not get rid of all the bugs, but they introduced a bunch of new ones. Hey Taco, I think you should name ScuttleMonkey v3 "RickJames". That way if anyone complains, you can have an automated response that just says, "I'm RickJames, bitch!" No one can argue with that.
In any case, those are the only two that I know are computer programs. There's no way to tell how many other /. editors are scripts. Call me paranoid, but I wonder sometimes if Slashdot as a whole isn't a ploy by the machines to waste humanity's time while they plan their attack. You thought Caprica Six planted a virus in the Colonial defense system? Nope. She just installed Slashdot on the defense network and waited. Once everyone was busy arguing about the latest kdawson dupe the Cylons attacked.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
"The summary isn't quite correct, because the article says '<foreign language>', which actually translates to something like '<english translation>'"
Slashdot then totally mangles the quote they took out of the article and displays it in random ASCII characters. Is it something that's totally necessary for the site to have? No, but it's 2009, sites should be able to deal with more than ASCII. I certainly think it would have been a better use of developer time than achievements.
Sturgeon was an optimist.
The Firehose lets us all know just how bad the Slashdot story submission poll really is. There is a lot of tripe in there; ads, dupes, polemicals, rotten formatting, dupes, enormous submissions, just plain boring stories and more dupes.
The issue of story selection is a deep and chronic one at Slashdot. Essentially, the root of the problem is that there is no real incentive to post a good submission, and more incentive to simply post a swathe of low quality submissions instead. I and many other submitters have spent considerable time an effort on compiling and editing submissions, only to have them rejected within minutes, while dupes were chosen instead.
Now, when you submit you have to accept that your story may not be posted. But when quality submissions are getting lost amid the deluge, it's easy to see how good potential submitters can become disheartened and will simply stop submitting good stories. By contrast, the shotgun submitter who spends less time on each submission, but submits more submissions in total, will be more likely to have a story posted and will continue submitting. The end result is the current, appalling state of the firehose. Admittedly the front page has improved in recent times, but the firehose is as bad as ever.
The best way to solve this problem is to give submitters a karma system. This would allow the system to distinguish between submitters who write good stories that didn't make it, and submitters who just wrote tripe. A meta moderation system for submissions would go a long way to improving the submission box and hence the front page.
May the Maths Be with you!
I really like the new system(s), especially the async page loading and 'fetch on demand' aspects of comments. But...
Please oh please, add a "submit" button next to the moderation dropdown? It should do the same asynchronous post that selection change of that dropdown does today. It's very easy (especially using a sensitive touchpad) to mis-click on a moderation option - which you can then only undo by replying in the conversation, and losing any point(s) awarded.*
A submit button would remove the accidental moderation issue, and still allow the all the ajaxified web2.0 paradigms to remain intact ;)
* then - to add insult to injury - usually get that corrective post modded down as offtopic because of some moderator a power trip
Foreigner - posted a comment with Unicode characters
Know your entities:
For some reason though ² nor ² work for squared, as doesn't ³ or ³ for cubed.
Other supported named entities: ¥ ¦ © ® ± ¼ ½ ¾ × ÷ À Á Â Ã Ä Å Æ Ç È É Ê Ë Ì Í Î Ï Ð Ñ Ò Ó Ô Õ Ö Ø Ù Ú Û Ü Ý ß à á â ã ä å æ ç è é ê ë ì í î ï ð ñ ò ó ô õ ö ø ù ú û ü ý ÿ.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Or is there some new rule in English that under no circumstances can a non-English character appear in English text?
¥€$, åb$ø¦û±€|ý.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?