Friday, March 5, 2004

Improvement to the caching code. It appears Manila had a pretty huge design flaw, when it came to caching the RSS version of a site, it would rebuild the RSS every time, unless the caller had a cached version of the feed. Now I might be missing something, but that seems totally wrong. Why should my server have to work so hard just because one reader doesn't have a cached copy? Why can't I maintain a cached copy that's valid until I change something that effects the RSS feed. In a way this post is a test to see if I made the change correctly. The RSS feed for this site should now change, because I changed the home page. Back in a minute with the result. Seems to work. [crimson1 News] Good catch. Dave pointed this out as well. We agree that the caching code doesn't seem right. Jake mentioned that he last worked in this area when ETag/If-None-Match support was added for Manila's RSS and scriptingNews2 feeds and wondered why the caching was implemented that way. It's difficult to read and too complicated. Jake is working now on simplifying the code and making sure that the logic is right. We should have a new version shortly. Thanks for the heads up. 10:04:59 PM    comment []

On the infrastructure side, I am please to say that UserLand is getting its act together with a full suite of fast new servers. This will really help the Radio comments issue and significantly improve the user experience with Radio.  Hope to have these beasts on-line in the next week or so. 3:54:06 PM    comment []

I gave a presentation early this week to a group of people responsible for the intranets of some very large companies who were interested in blogs, RSS, CMS and other evolving creatures of the web realm. I think they thoroughly enjoyed the presentation. After the introductions, I realized that their readers probably total around one million employees worldwide. Though people reading this blog are familiar with the technology and have been using it for years, the corporate audience is often later to adopt. All experts in their fields, most had little or no experience with this stuff. (Some of the researchers were quite familiar.) Overall, they were blown away by Radio and Manila with lots of questions around how to best use RSS and the effect it would have on their organizations when you start the two-way communication process. There was also excellent feedback on the proposed feature set for Enterprise Manila (a.k.a. Manila 10.0) 1:34:13 PM    comment []

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