Cragwag Tweets Once More

Hey all, this weekend I finally got time to fix the Twitter/OAuth integration, so Cragwag is now tweeting once again. Yay!

Next thing on my list is to come up with a way of throttling the tweet rate, as I've had some feedback to the effect that it gets a bit much if it's tweeting everything. Maybe something along these lines: once every hour, it will tweet the latest post that hasn't already been tweeted. Any thoughts?

Cragwag server move

Cragwag has been growing steadily since it first launched last year, and it's become clear in the last month or so that the cheap-and-cheerful server it was on (a single small EC2 instance in the US-East availability zone, shared with a couple of my other apps) was just not up to the load it's been getting. Page load times of ~10s, timeouts on clicking through from tweeted posts - nah, not good enough.

So this weekend I've switched it to a new, faster server (still a single EC2 instance, but this time it's in the EU zone and it's a large instance) and initial results look good. As with any server move, there's always the possibility of the odd gremlin here and there, so if you encounter any weird behaviour over the next few days, let me know.

New URLs for posts and blogs

Cragwag now has much friendlier "permalinks" for blogs and posts. E.g.

/posts/title-of-post-1234

rather than just

/posts/1234

The old format should still be supported, so any existing links will still work - or at least, they should :) Give me a shout if not.

Blog Suggestion Form FIXED

Just noticed that the form for suggesting a new blog had a bit of a bug in it - it kept asking for a username and password when you clicked "check". Oops - my bad, all fixed now.

So if there's a climbing-related blog that we're not covering, go fill in the form and let us know!

Al

A Growing Site Needs Its Lunch

....or a slightly more cunning caching strategy. Yes, Cragwag is getting more and more traffic every day, which is great - but it means I have to put more effort into keeping it running.

Some of the queries that it's running are pretty complex (try clicking on a two-word term, like Chris Sharma, and take a look at the Related / Broader / Narrower tabs box on the left - nifty, huh? :) and as the site gets more hits, it's more and more important to avoid hitting the database whereever possible.

So I've made some improvements to the caching strategies this afternoon, hopefully this will help keep things zippy without causing any weirdness (from data being retrieved from cache when it really should have been hitting the database, etc). If you do spot any such weirdness, give me a shout.

Al

Announcing the Cragwag Tech Blog

I'LL be using this blog to make announcements about Cragwag tech - new features, problems found and solved, and so on. YOU can use this blog to make comments, give feedback, make feature requests, etc.
Fire away!