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It's been a few years since I was the webmaster of a community site. Back in '97 - '98 though I was the webmaster of (and programmer for) the original javascripts.com. Unfortunately for the site, after it got bought out by earthweb.com, it promptly lost all it's unique sense of flavor (and quirkyness).

I must admit a large part of that sense of oddness, well... cough cough was my doing.

Back to the point — I'm sure programming tutorials and articles will start showing up on this site soon enough though.

I should mention for reference, that this is a personal blog. All technical site related posts from myself happen over at (untitled) .

test.

For technical reference: There is what we call a caching mechanism that is implimented for this entire site — this includes all blog pages.

What do I mean by that and how does it affect you?

It means that the first time anyone ever looks at your new blog, the page is created on the fly by the code that drives this site which first pulls all your blog information from the SQL database server that the site uses. (If you're not technical, just let your eyes glaze past that last part. The details don't matter.)

The important part is that it then saves the generated page as plain html. Anytime after the first time that someone looks at your blog post, they're getting the cache html version.

The reason we do this is speed. And responsiveness. By caching the pages the site can stand a much higher load of visitors than without. (It gives a 5X to 20X boost to the site currently. That will probably increase as the site become more mature and optimized).

The single downside to this is that sometimes, just sometimes some of the pages seem to be stuck. You update something and they don't seem to change no matter what you do.

That's my fault. The caching mechanism is somewhat complicated. It is almost entirely automatic these days, but on occasion there might be an older page or a section that has not been properly marked and so the cache for that area doesn't get purged when you make changes (as it should be).

If you encounter such a situation, let me know and I'll look into it.

NOTE: The areas where you edit your content are not cached. FYI. Only the public areas.

Anyone reading it?

Anyone at all?

sniff

(Ok, that's a guilt trip simply to try to get someone to test out the "post a comment" option a few times to verify it's working correctly. :) )