Misc Slashdot Notes

So now I'm finishing up the mess I started yesterday. Lots more minor stuff that needs fixing and tweaking. So don't be surprised if you see any errors today. I'm not pulling the cron job offline, so things should function normally.

Oh, and don't be surprised by the book reviews that follow this article on the homepage. We are reorganizing the book reviews now, and so we are reposting them. Under the new system, you can post comments to them as well.

Another interesting side note- you may or may not care, but as of this minute, we have 25,142 comments posted on Slashdot, as well as 1,053 stories (we lost several hundred of the older stories after the rewrite). It's pretty crazy. Updated Hardcore readers will want to read this. Updated Again! Cookies are fixed now. And just in time for The Simpsons :)

Allright, the cookie code is still busted, but Dave should be on that tonight if I can keep him away from his close, personal friends (Jim Beam and Jack Daniels). Anyway, some stuff that is working now:

The whole site now uses 2 cron jobs (it was 7 or 8). One runs every 60 seconds and one runs every midnight. We used to have one to generate new fortunes, snag Freshmeat, update various bits here and there, but now that is all handled by a single proggie. It's much less complicated.

Each Subtype has a homepage now. This is still a bit wierd, but it'll make more sense soon. Mainly this means that the books section can look different than the articles section. The 3 sections currently are features, books, and articles. Someday I hope to add a few more section including hardware and software reviews, and whatever else there is an intense demand for. Perhaps a seperate 'humor' section for those comedy impaired people who can't tell when something is meant to be funny, and like to flame me for posting things so obviously untrue.

Flattened Pages The homepage itself is available with all the links going to flattened articles. The url is slashdot.org/index_F.shtml. I just want to beg one last time that when you use the flat mode, please click the reply button on the article you are replying to. If you do this, both threaded and flattened pages will be happy. I want the threads to be default (and prefered) because it's a much easier way to organize pages when they get to 100-125 comments, but as long as the people who prefer flat mode reply appropriately, I'll leave the flat mode up for them.

Cookies are still busted! When they are fixed, the poll booth will properly display in flat/threaded mode, and your email/urls should once again be saved properly.

What about the source? It's coming. Soon. Right now I'm chatting with a few sites that may become test sites. The first few times this gets ported, I'm going to have to be involved because a lot of stuff is weird yet. Currently The license is going to be pretty fair I think- the code will be free for whatever you want, as long as you put a Slashdot logo and link on any site created with the my codebase. I'll negotiate with sites that don't want to link me. This way Slashdot gets some growth, and hopefully several dozen cool sites will pop up using the code. But first there needs to be some more clean up.

Finally there still is the mod_perl/DBI/Apache/Mysql problem. Somewhere along the lines, a persistant database connection goes screwy, and although Mysql seems to query fine, no data is returned to the perl script. This is why you regulars are seeing the occasional blank page. Its a big pain. I really want to work on fixing that.

Datamode Obsoleted Its gone. History. For those who know what I'm talking about, contact me for info on its replacement.

If you're curious about what we're working on, finger [e-mail] and [e-mail] for details as they happen.