Megen says I only like “old man” music but she recently found a station that we both like. 100.5 The Drive plays alternative music from years ago; mostly from back when we were in high school. It is awesome because they go from Tori Amos to 10,000 Maniacs to Fastball (remember The Way?). It’s fun because everyone knows all the lyrics to these songs :P. Thanks Megen!
Archive for February, 2008
Megen found a new radio station
Thursday, February 21st, 2008RSSmeme – 512MB Slice
Saturday, February 16th, 2008RSSmeme is getting hit hard by the Googlebot and msnbot. Rather than telling them to slow down (I want to get into the Google index as fast as possible) I decided to upgrade to a 512MB slice for the time being. Slicehost made this drop dead simple. I clicked a button in the control panel and it started copying my slice to a new one. Once everything was copied over they sent me an email saying that the copy was complete and to expect some downtime. 2 minutes later (literally) I got another email saying the new slice is up and running. You then verify that everything is working (it was) and click a button in the control panel to tell Slicehost that they can delete the old slice.
I’m now rocking 3 times as many Apache server processes and twice as much memory reserved for memcache (and I still have a bit to spare). RSSmeme is very snappy now. Once things calm down I might consider dropping back to a 256MB slice because it was working well when most of my hits were coming to the main page and never reached the database because of aggresive caching.
Update: RSSmeme is back on a 256MB slice. I reorganized my database structure and no longer need the extra memory. Again Slicehost made this very easy.
RSSmeme – Javascript Love
Friday, February 15th, 2008RSSmeme is now even more Web 2.0 with the addition of Javascript events. When Brian Beck gave RSSmeme a makeover he also threw in the ability to shrink down the tag/shared user list by using jQuery. This got me interested in jQuery and I found myself not completely hating it. I have had bad experiences with Javascript before but jQuery makes it fun and easy. RSSmeme can now:
- Hide a story by clicking the “hide” link next to the “share!” link. This is basically fluff but I could imagine you could use it to hide stories as you read. It then becomes a “show” link to show the story again.
- Load the next level up in details for an individual story without changing your global preview setting. If you find a story interesting you can click the “read more” link in the “Explore” subsection next to the “similar stories” link. This will ask RSSmeme for more details about the story. For example: if you are currently set to preview “none” then it will load “some”. Click it again and it will load “all” and hide the link (there isn’t any more to see!).
There are probably more important things I can work on but this was fun for my first excursion into jQuery and JSON. Django and jQuery made it painless.
Dear Google: Language Identification in your Feeds
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008Attention anyone working for Google; could you somehow let someone from Google Reader know that RSSmeme would love it if every item in a shared feed contained the xml:lang tag?
Love,
Ben
