NoseRub

I hoped to have it ready by the weekend and am happy to announce, that NoseRub now comes with optional feed caching. I already activated that option on Identoo.com and you now should see much faster page displays. They are not lightning fast, because a lot of external data is loaded when there are photos in feeds, so it is not all my fault...

Alex is currently working on a different display of the network- and personal-feed. It will be much more compact and probably only display it contents after a click on a specific item. That would speed up speed as well.

For those who are interested in the technics behind the feed caching: the library we use (SimplePie), of course does caching and conditional requests, so a feed was not fetched every time a profile page was loaded. But when the internal cache was invalid, SimplePie made a request to the server, what resulted in the long delays while displaying the pages.

Now all feeds are stored in the database and NoseRub just displays what is inside the database. Another process runs in the background and runs every ten minutes to update the feed data in the database. This way, page display is constantly fast and does not depend on how "old" the feed data is.

The downside is, that there might be a newer information in the feed, but the background process yet did not fetch it. But I think that is not such a big downside and optimization can be made. Even now, NoseRub counts how often a feed is viewed between two refresh cycles. So this could taken into account to maybe refresh popular feeds even more often.

It is also doable to update feeds from Twitter-like services more often, as more updates are very probably. I will monitor this and optimize accordingly.