The Market Ticker Is Now On AKCS

The Market Ticker is now operating on the same codebase as the forum at LINK`http`market-ticker.org/`text-decoration: none; color: blue; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; `LINK.

This change was made after a couple of months of development time.  It brings the following to the blog, all of which I hope is of benefit to readers:

• AKCS is a lot faster.  The difference is not at all subtle; in terms of CPU load-per-view it is something on the order of 10x as efficient.  This is what happens, incidentally, when you stop using interpreted BS (e.g. PHP) and run under compiled “C” code.  Simply-put, interpreted PHP junk will never outperform reasonably-well-written compiled binaries.
   
• Viewing Tickers on PDAs is now reasonable.  It wasn’t before.  Again, this is due to the codebase difference – AKCS simply knows how to deal with PDAs in an efficient and reasonable fashion.
   
• The AKCS codebase has the full-text search available that is used in the forum, and it is extremely fast.   This makes the search box extremely efficient, and in addition, unlike the old code, it brings up a list of topics in which the search term(s) are found, allowing you to choose (instead of just starting to display articles, which I personally hated.)
   
• The sidebar is under my complete control.  The old software (Serendipity) had some control of the sidebar, but nowhere near as solid as what I have now.  This is dramatically better in terms of what I can do with it in the future.
   
• You can now search Tickers from the forum.  That was impossible before.  Since comments are done in the forum, this makes sense and “should” work.  Now, it does.
   
• Images are now in the gallery, which is dramatically more-efficient, especially when it comes to thumbnails on PNG files.  That was a huge problem before due to some bad decisions made in the image code in Serendipity – that problem is now in the past (permanently so.)   This also means that should something go wrong in the future and I need to “fail over” to the backup servers, the images are there – instead of stuck on a down machine.  Note that the previous base of images is still present in “hard code” form and will remain that way (I am not going to attempt to load them into the database and then re-base all the image references), so this mostly impacts images going forward.
   
• To deal with some of the load issues Serendipity had a somewhat-transparent internal cache function.  That had to be on for the Ticker to be able to support the load of the userbase.  AKCS has no need for it as it properly handles cache validation requests for images and similar things, and as such not only do I have no need for an application-level cache I was able to shut down the Apache (web-server) level cache as well for both the forum and the Ticker.  The impact of this change is that if I (or you) make a change and you “reload” the page, it willimmediately appear – unlike before, when it could take an hour or more before the change showed up on your end.
   
• Twitter announcements are now done without damaging the URLs.  The Ticker has a short syntax that makes things like “bit.ly” unnecessary.  I have never liked obscured URLs and this gave me the opportunity to get rid of them, so I did.

Note that the old “archive” links that are literally everywhere on the web, including in various search engines, continue to work.  They’re deprecated on a forward basis, but for backward-compatibility reasons the code does understand them and will properly search out the article in question and find it for you, so if you follow an old link, it will work.  What won’t work is the old category and author links – those are gone as they did not map over.

There are a few things that have gone away.  One of them is explicit RSS links.  The Ticker has the proper RSS header tag in it on every page, so if you point a RSS reader at the top page itshould find the proper place to grab the feed from.  Note that AKCS only supports RSS v2, so if you’re using ATOM or RSSv1, you have to change your feedpoint.

The lesser-used “buttons” that did social network sharing are gone.  I’m working on getting the Twitter button back – their buttons don’t seem to pick up the URLs properly for an unknown reason.  Facebook’s does, and has been fixed.  Networkblogs, which picked up the automated feed from the Ticker, works fine with the new format.  If you have a specific suggestion for a social networking link you want put on the pages, post something in Suggestions on the forum and I’ll look at it.

Access controls, particularly IP-level ones, are active on The Ticker as well, and are shared with the forum.  While you can access The Ticker without being signed on (and as such if you get banned from the forum you can read the Ticker), if you manage to get an IP-level ban issued against your IP address (or range of addresses) The Ticker will also become inaccessible.  What this means is “don’t be a jerk” on the forum to a degree that I feel justified in barring your address block, or you’ll find that literally nothing works any more.

I have attempted to keep the “look and feel” of The Ticker to the degree it has been reasonable.  There are some minor differences, but in general you shouldn’t note much, other than radically-better performance.

As always comments are welcome, and if there’s something you would like to see – or something you find that’s broken – I’d appreciate the input.  Since I now have complete codebase control, I can likely fix things quickly if and when they go wrong.

Enjoy!

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