Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
scriptingNews outline for 10/8/2000
Author: Dave Winer Posted: 10/8/2000; 7:08:19 AM Topic: scriptingNews outline for 10/8/2000 Msg #: 21866 Prev/Next: 21865 / 21867
Mets win series 3-1, on 1-hit shutout by Jones. Giants wait till next year. Next stop -- St Louis!
Oy, Yankees win. Grrr. I never thought I'd say this.. Go Mariners!
Do the Mariners have a philosophy?
BTW, to Sheila, who thinks the Mariners have a philosophy, please recall what the city fathers (and mothers) did to their stadium in March.
At the time, I wondered what would be next Seattle civic monument to be demolished.
It takes several generations if a philosophy is to develop, and the instant you demolish your stadium, unfortunately, you must start over. I didn't make the rules.
Late afternoon feature
After I get back from a walk I'm going to finish a feature that allows Radio UserLand people to browse the Weblogs.Com favorites structure. It's "OPML" all the way.
Oooops, I forgot I have to watch the As beat the Yankees. This may have to wait till Monday or Tuesday.
Thanks Sam!
I just spotted this Open Letter to Dave.
What a nice thought. Thanks man.
Never say never
Cameron Barrett: "One of the conclusions the audience came to at the Content Management System roundtable at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in Monterey, CA back in July was that there will likely never be an out-of-the-box CMS package or solution that will fill the needs, requirements and functionality of most of people or companies seeking a solution."
I don't agree. If you study lots of sites, you'll see there are a common set of requirements. "Never" is a long time. Usually when you think something will never happen, it's already happening. Life is funny that way.
I'm betting that content management is a mass application. Otherwise we're going to be stuck only with pubs that can afford expensive and hard to keep running one-off CMSes. I don't think it'll shake out that way.
CMS-Vendor discussion
On the CMS-Vendor list, Stephen Tyler posted a lengthy summary of the issues between content management systems and various kinds of crawlers, including the bursty kind, RSS readers, users with defective site-grabbers, and the search engines.
I posted a response where I explain our immediate concern with the search engine crawlers, and note a performance improvement in the engine behind Weblogs.Com.
Weblogs.Com performance
Here's how I found the optimization for "Weblogs.Com".
I looked at the calendar, and noticed that almost half of the sites hadn't changed in over a week. Some hadn't changed at all in months. Yet we're reading every one of those sites every hour, to see if they've changed, and changes seem to become less likely as the weeks and months go by.
The new algorithm is more patient. If a site hasn't updated in over seven days, it only sends out one request every 24 hours. They don't all come at once since we retain the time of the last update, we only send the request out in the hour they last updated, which should scatter the requests fairly evenly over a 24 hour period.
When an inactive site becomes active, it might take 23 hours before we detect the change. That's the tradeoff. If you want us to check every hour, update at least once a week.
Since the inactive sites also tend to be slower (lots of timeouts) the net increase in performance was over 400 percent. This means that Weblogs.Com finishes its scan after three or four minutes. It was getting close to fifteen minutes per scan!
Today's baseball poetry
Signs of philosophic weakness in NY.
"If it can't be the Yankees, God forbid, then I hope it's the Mets because it's still New York."
See what I mean about Yankees fans?
God does forbid. Ambivalence yields earthquakes. Let me tell you a story. Pick a team, go down with the ship, if necessary. Of course when a team has a deep philosophy, that's often not necessary. (And there's always next year.)
A reader unfamiliar with the philosophy of the Mets asked if Bobby Valentine was a spiritual leader.
"Not really," I said. "But Casey Stengel, now there was a deep thinker and a man of peace."
Marc Canter, a man without a team, asked "What's the philosophy of the Mets?"
"Love," I said.
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