Just a quick note to all viewers/commenters/lurkers⟴hat I will be working on the WordPress theme for this blog in order to try to fix several things that got broken when I upgraded the WordPress software to 2.1.
Because its a theme, no comments will be lost, nor posts deleted because I’m not affecting the database where everything is stored – so fear not if it looks a little peculiar for a few hours.
Climate Audit 
13 Comments
What do you plan on using? Which plugins? Whatever it is, I hope you’re sticking with a fluid width (of course a fixed width would make it easier to deal with some of the image issues…).
I have liked the relatively clean/simple feel of CA, so I hope that sticks around, too…
I’m not changing the theme again (although I’d try something else if redalt.com’s index generator were to work again) but if I were to do so then it would be fluid width all the way.
See the post I made on how CA is constructed here
Update:
Links, Articles, blogroll etc are now working (that turns out to be a hack because of a fundamental change in the code in WordPress 2.1)
Previous entries/Next entries are now being shown at the bottom of the page – problem cause by Adhesive plug-in which has had to be disabled.
Suggestion:
Can hyperlinks within posts be colorized or underlined? Often I miss a hyperlink becaue they are nearly the same color as the text surrounding it.
John A.
Would it be possible to put up a page that translates the acronyms you folks use? Occasional visitors like me get endlessly confused (and irritated) by the incessant flow of untranslated GISS, HadCRU3 etc. etc.
“It’s a sin to waste the reader’s time” — Larry Niven
Thanks in advance,
Pete Tillman
Re: #5
FAQ coming PDQ, OK?
Perhaps readers would like to assist Peter Tillman by adding the acronyms on this thread and then I’ll add them to an acronyms page.
It’s really getting irksome seeing an interesting message appear momentarily in the new posts section and then when you click on it disappearing for up to a half hour until the next update. Is it really necessary to have the updates so rarely? I’d think every 5 minutes or so would be sufficient to cut down the load on the server. If I understand it properly, the system just needs to work backward through the most recent posts to get the 20-25 which don’t include more than 5 from any given thread. Then when a new page request is made the requested page has the last update included as static content. I can’t imagine the updates themselves require much server time. The previous problem was, I thought, that the update had to be done for each new page request. Cacheing the recent comments avoids that, but I’d think they could still be done fairly often without slowing the overall system enough to notice. And since if most people are like me, they keep trying to see if the missing message has appeared yet when it disappears, the system gain may be negative.
Dave I agree fully, it’s very annoying, other bloggers don’t seem to have this problem
Hans,
I doubt there are many other bloggers that have the volume this site does.
#8,9. We tried lowering the cache to 15 minutes and the system crashed. We’ve upgraded the server memory and are using an expensive dedicated server. realclimate screens all posts; by batching their approvals, they have a de facto caching system that’s much longer than 15 minutes.
Other than realclimate (and even there I suspect that our volume is comparable by many measures), I think that our volume is very high relative to most blogs judging by how high we occur in a broad variety of google searches and by the number of daily posts. Technorati ranks blogs by the number of links from other sites and we don’t rank at all high in that respect. But if you look at the activity of blogs that have higher Technorati ranks, none have similar volumes of posts. This site also has high graphical loads as pictures and illustrations are encouraged, adding to the load.
Added to this, we are deluged with spam. We had nearly 600 spams yesterday, all of which use Spam Karma capacity.
So I don’t see any changes in cache time on the horizon, although we’ll keep thinking about it.
Steve,
Is there anyway to get the recent comments pane to ignore posts that are still in the cache?
Is it possible to attach the ‘update cache’ command to the ‘post comment’ event ?
Hm, one solution along the lines of what fFreddy is suggesting, would be to scan say every minute for posts which have new comments, and delete the cache file for that post, forcing it to be regenerated.
That would be better than attaching it to the “post comment” event because if 10 people post comments in a row, it would avoid regenerating the cache 10 times. You’d have to limit the refresh to the post on which there are new comments, I think, otherwise it will negate the whole point of caching.