Now there's no going back !
I've just finished cleaning up and decommissioning the old server so for better or worse, we're stuck with the new version now - I hope it's at least no worse the the old site and hopefully getting better as I fix issues and make improvements and people get used to the changes. Apart from RSS feeds I think all the features that the old site had are now available on the new one plus many extra ones.
The old server had faithfully served us for the last 3+ years and will now drift away, probably to be used by some other site. I feel there should be a moment where I get to fire a burning arrow to set a funeral boat alight a-la Game of Thrones but apparently, you're not allowed inside the datacenter at all, certainly not with weapons and they have no intention of flooding any part of it. Ah well ...
Anyway, to the latest changes ...
I've done some work to improve caching and to change how the paging works. There were some jobs running to build the new indexes required which would have slowed the posting down a little yesterday but things should have picked up now. Lower latencies aren't always apparent to every user with every request but the averages I see from the monitoring console definitely look better. Performance of viewing topics and paging through the main topic listing should be faster now and it opens up some new abilities for future improvements.
The observant will have noticed that paging through topic lists used to have a "cursor" parameter in the URL. This was a pointer to the place in the dataset where it could continue on the next page. Unfortunately it is 'opaque' which meant there was no way to arbitrarily jump to any particular spot in the data. The new version instead uses more human-readable parameters and I'll be able to add options to jump to specific places, e.g. if you want to see 2005 topics for whatever reason.
I've fixed a few issues that may have affected preferences from being recorded so if you set a page size it should do a better job of remembering it although it is still based on cookies so if you don't save them or clear them then things will reset.
Next things I intend to work on are:
- Feedback for the like / dislike options (maybe something like: +5 / -2 next to the vote options?)
- Ability to mark / watch / favourite a topic
- Dashboards to show topics you've started, topics you've posted on, topics you are watching, recommended / highly rated topics ... all based on date last updated.
I'll continue to work on bog fixes too and improving cross-browser compatibility etc...
I should add too - I'm still experimenting with performance settings / configuration so don't be too concerned if the site speeds up or slows down at different times, it's most likely just me experimenting