Alicornutopia

+1 star

I can do stars xD There are star medals with a plus and minus or a basic star with no plus or minus , feel free to continue to have opinions.

+1 no medals :P

*photoshops*








I can do more variants/tweaks on this theme if anyone has suggestions

I suspect the gold is the only one of those that looks okay on both dark and light backgrounds, could somebody maybe check? Or I'll do it when the cat's done napping on my wrist.

Actually, as far as I can tell, the dark grey and dark blue are the only ones that don't look okay on both. The pale grey is a little weird on the light blue forum background, but the rest are fine both ways.

Updates:
- Bolding of never-opened posts
- Gold stars instead of hearts
- Fragment caching on views to make loading posts faster

Hopefully that last one improves post view speed... it was terrifying to release, since there's literally no way to fully test locally. It was definitely slow for a bit while the cache warmed, and then for some reason restarting the app made it speed up, and I'm going to be reading about caching all weekend I can already tell :/

There are two hard things in computer science. The first one is called "cache invalidation".

Ezra wrote:There are two hard things in computer science. The first one is called "cache invalidation".

<3333333

I actually first heard that joke as "there are two truly hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming conventions, and off by one errors."

For the technically curious, I didn't actually add much caching, and none of it's custom; Rails in theory has its cache invalidation under control. Most of what I did was change our cache structure from file based (the Rails default, but a horrible design for Heroku, which has an ephemeral file system) to Redis based after installing the free Redis plugin. And then I used a Rails builtin to go from generating "render array <list of replies for this thread>" to "render array <list of replies for this this thread>, with cache"*. I have not yet put caching anywhere else. I did check into the cache invalidation strategy for the list of replies place I put it; the cache key is built with the class name, id and updated_at key of the object, so it'll expire whenever you save it (<this is also why I haven't done it for top level posts yet; updated_at is not tagged_at, and updated_at changes whenever a new reply is made, so caching won't gain us much if I use the built in, I'll have to design my own) and an md5 digest of the template file so it'll also expire whenever you change the template. Which I am reasonably comfortable with being the important invalidation spots to hit?

*code:

It's alive! It was more expensive than expected because I got SSL up too, and took like two days to get the certs issued properly, and all your cookies including login are for the old domain so those'll all vanish, and if you disable Javascript by default or anything I'm sure those need redoing, and whatever it's done.

Also, wtf am I even doing, it's past 4am bed now.