About

This is a blog.

If you haven't been here in a really long time, there used to be more people. And then I switched to new blog software and didn't copy anything over. I think I still have it on disk somewhere. I asked people interested in having an account to e-mail me. And not many did. So there are fewer people now.

This Site

This main page in particular is something I whipped up... I'm running WPMU (WordPress Multi-User) on the main site, but wanted a way to show everyones' posts together on a page. I found some plugins but they weren't great at the time, so I wrote my own to query the database directly. And then I contracted OCD and rewrote it to use Memcache way more than is reasonable.

Elements

The "Favorites" category is generated in a very specific way. In a nutshell, it's a random compilation of the links everyone puts on their site. In way more detail than you'd care about:

  • I (or rather, the code I wrote) look(s) at the list of what I've identified as public, active blogs on this site.
  • I pull a random 12 (or however many are in the list, whichever is less) links out of each person's "blogroll", excluding links to sites with "Wordpress" in the title and excluding links with "blogs.n1zyy.com" in them.
  • I aggregate them all and pick a random 12 ones.
  • I cache it in Memcache for 10 seconds. This means it will update fairly often, but not necessarily on every page load.

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Generating the Main Page

Some people have asked how the main page is generated. I have a complex query, that essentially says:

  • For each blog included, get the posts from the past three days, limited to 75% of 16. (The 16 is set in a configuration file, hence 0.75*16 when I could just say "12.")
  • I combine all the results into one big set.
  • From that set, I sort them by time and take the 16 most recent.

The 75% rule is meant to slightly minimize the effects of people (me!) dominating the main page: if I've been potsing a lot in rapid succession, the post by someone new is preferred, in a sense.

Note that a post has to be one of your 12 most recent, AND less than three days old to show up. Thus the main page often has less than its 16-post maximum.

Can I have a blog?

if(You're interesting && I know you && You write well && You can understand this) probably

Note that, technically, I can provide people with blogs that don't show up on the main page, which I'd be more inclined to let you have. If you know me, though, you know how to get in touch with me. ;)