Johnny Lemuria - 24 October 2009 06:58 AM

So, I tried searching for one of my posts on AVLlive, using the search box at the bottom of the blog. The post is The Great Anarchy Debate, Redone, Part 1. I put in “anarchy” as a keyword, but nothing came up. I searched manually by going through each entry for that day, and I say it was there. Why didn’t the keyword search work?

Crummy default search only crawling the entries once or twice a day, I’d bet. The next version of our blogroll site should be better. This one was basically a proof-of-concept.

That’s much faster. Looks like the same thing Popurls is using. I kinda liked the blog format better, I must say. It would be cool to be able to comment on things without leaving the site.

Am I clueless or is there no search function?

You’re not clueless. It’s straight-up aggregation, with nothing stored locally other than the cache. It’s very much modeled on the same concepts as Popurls.

We’ll almost certainly be bringing the blog-syndication site back under another domain, and that will probably feed into AVLLive.com rather than the quick-and-dirty (and very incomplete) Yahoo Pipes feed I created for the new version of the site.

A little off topic…Steve, I had no idea you were so adorable! How have I missed this all this time?

Sadly, in reality I am not really a small Asian child dressed as Luigi from the Super Mario Brothers video game series. But I’m glad you like the avatar.

Also, if anyone was missing the blogroll/blog syndication part of AVLLive, it’s back under a subdomain: http://blogs.avllive.com/

Steve,

Very excellent site.  I think this is a great resource.  My social networking girlfriend Erin Scholze found this over the course of her day and brought it to my attention.

I am the technology director for a new tech company called SumNetworks based here in Asheville.  Our flagship site is SumSport Soccer and we are a news aggregation site focused on the worldwide phenomenon of soccer.  I mention this because we have been dealing with a very similar set of issues as you guys are discussing on this thread.

Just wondering… why are you using both Scriptaculous and Jquery?  What does one do for you that the other doesn’t do as well?  I don’t see it affecting the performance issues within the browser, but loading both libraries carries a significant overhead that could be avoided by just picking one and going with it.  Both are highly capable javascript libraries that do a lot of the same types of things… the difference to me really is in flavor and style of the code and how you like to write it.

Popurl is a great site and a fantastic resource that you have obviously modeled avllive after.  Their design is neat, crisp and clean.  I would make the recommendation that you alter your layout and presentation to appear a bit more unique and representative of the Asheville community.  Just a thought… or at least change the color scheme.

I am intrigued by your idea of straight aggregation - holding the data in a memory cache and not using the database as a storage tool.  We had to make a design decision ourselves that we were going to use a database, mostly due to the overwhelming size of our chosen topic.  So we run feed updating as a background process entirely separate from the normal request/response cycle.  It has its strengths and its weaknesses.

I thought I should ask if you are using a plugin to do the feed fetching or if you rolled your own sexy feed machine.  I have found that including header checks, or conditional gets, has saved a huge amount of headroom on our updater.  Especially when you ping a properly formatted feed which contains the proper etags and modified dates.  If you are using a plugin, it would be worth looking at it to make sure that it utilizes this technique.

Anyway, Just thinking aloud as I look at what you are doing.  I find it to be an excellent community resource and thank you for creating it.  If I can do anything to help, please let me know.

Jay Sanders

mindtonic - 03 November 2009 04:26 PM

Very excellent site.  I think this is a great resource.

Thanks for the feedback, Jay. I look at it more as a glorified proof-of-concept at this point, but I’m glad you like it.

Just wondering… why are you using both Scriptaculous and Jquery? What does one do for you that the other doesn’t do as well? I don’t see it affecting the performance issues within the browser, but loading both libraries carries a significant overhead that could be avoided by just picking one and going with it.  Both are highly capable javascript libraries that do a lot of the same types of things… the difference to me really is in flavor and style of the code and how you like to write it.

We’re using Prototype, Script.aculo.us and Behaviour.js, as well as the jQuery-based ClueTip. These were used not so much because they’re all the best in every way, but because they were a quick-and-dirty means of getting the site working in advance of the blogger meetup last week. I basically found a way that would work and knocked it together ASAP. But it’s almost certainly not the best way to do this.

We’ll probably do exactly what you suggest as we start to refine the project. That’ll require someone who isn’t me writing the specific scripts, though. In a way, this is good, as the present form of AVLLive is probably the absolute worst version of it we’ll ever see.

Popurl is a great site and a fantastic resource that you have obviously modeled avllive after.  Their design is neat, crisp and clean.  I would make the recommendation that you alter your layout and presentation to appear a bit more unique and representative of the Asheville community.  Just a thought… or at least change the color scheme.

It’s like you can read my mind. The layout was lifted from an existing popurls-inspired WordPress template, since I knew that would work and had very little time to create the site (like two days). We’re going to be making lots of changes to the site in the near future, and all of these are on the “to do” list.

I am intrigued by your idea of straight aggregation - holding the data in a memory cache and not using the database as a storage tool.  We had to make a design decision ourselves that we were going to use a database, mostly due to the overwhelming size of our chosen topic.  So we run feed updating as a background process entirely separate from the normal request/response cycle.  It has its strengths and its weaknesses.

Again, you hit the nail on the head. We’ll probably move forward with a database of some kind, although that’s further down the road. The ultimate idea here would be to make the entire thing searchable, ratable, sharable and all that jazz. But, as I’m sure you know, that’ll time some development time.

I thought I should ask if you are using a plugin to do the feed fetching or if you rolled your own sexy feed machine.  I have found that including header checks, or conditional gets, has saved a huge amount of headroom on our updater.  Especially when you ping a properly formatted feed which contains the proper etags and modified dates.  If you are using a plugin, it would be worth looking at it to make sure that it utilizes this technique.

Excellent point. We’re using SimplePie aggregation at the moment, but that project is in development limbo and we may switch it out with something else later along. I have no idea about the header checks, but the actual tech guy will know. We’ll definitely work your idea in if it’s not set to do it already.

Anyway, Just thinking aloud as I look at what you are doing.  I find it to be an excellent community resource and thank you for creating it.  If I can do anything to help, please let me know.

We’ll probably take you up on that, Jay. As you’ve probably gathered, I’m not exactly a techie—I’m more of a well-intentioned hobbyist—and a lot of AVLLive’s design came right from message boards and tutorials. There’s nothing revolutionary in the design itself, although to the best of my knowledge no one has created something like it in Asheville. Since you’ve done this kind of thing before, we may well be asking for some feedback and protips as the development and customization goes on.