Advogato Status Report

A new rev of mod_virgule code went live on Advogato today. We have a couple of new features in addition to the usual minor changes and bugfixes. I'll summarize them but see the changelog for details.

The trust metric cache is now loaded into an Apache thread private memory pool so it can persist across hits. It no longer has to be loaded and parsed on every hit. Instead it's loaded only when the cache is updated (usually once per hour). I'm not sure if this will produce any noticable performance increase but mod_virgule doesn't seem to thrash the hard disk quite so much now.

Most of the major issues with gcc 4.x seem to be fixed. There are still loads of warnings due to char vs xmlChar mismatches. Explicit casts are needed to fix these and I'll continue adding them as I get time.

Hits on non-existent projects now return a 404 instead of a 200 so that search engines will stop pounding all sorts of bogus project URLs that have accumulated over the years. We get over 25k hits per month on one non-existent project, so this is eating a small but measurable amount of our bandwidth.

I've got about 75% of the coding done for blog syndication. It's now possible to specify a feed URL in a user profile. The feeds are aggregated hourly but are not appended to the Advogato blogs yet. I got bogged down (blogged down?) in the minor differences between RSS, Atom, and mod_virgule diary formats. They all use different formats for dates, of course. I'm hoping to have a few more hours available this week to finish it up. I'll probably test it for a few days on robots.net and then take it live here once I'm fairly sure it's stable.

Advogato.org is now set up over at Technorati. Well, maybe. It seems to take several attempts to get anything set up at Technorati. Their view of our RSS feed is still hosed but it should clear up after the next couple of articles are posted. Technorati syndication might generate a little more human traffic to our stories here. Now we just need to work on posting some interesting, original content like in the good ol' days. Maybe advogato the cat could be induced to bring back the Advogato's Number editorials (hint hint).

rillian asked about switching the recentlog to "as posted" mode from the current "unique" mode where only one post per user is allowed. He made the point that the Planet aggregators do this and it seems to be the preferred method by most readers. With the spam problem under control, I didn't see any reason not to make the switch. So, as of 3 November, any blog posts made should show up in recentlog until they scroll off naturally according to the date.