Dane points out that the number of posts is now just four ahead (five after this post) of the number of comments. I am tempted to go on a posting spree in an attempt to maintain my lead, however, I must admit this is a battle I can’t possibly win. Therefore, I surrender to the incoming tidal wave of comments. :)
Update after this posting: Posts 2239, Comments 2234. (But dammit, posts’ strength of schedule is stronger!)
NOTE: I could also fight the battle by going back and eliminating duplicate and spam comments, but that would only buy me a week or two, and it’s way too much trouble. :) Plus, as discussed earlier, I don’t want to create doubts about the legitimacy of Dane’s comment #2000.
Nope, I’m afraid you can’t possibly win this battle. Although I would question your strength of schedule numbers. I mean, I think that the Posts strength of schedule would be much stronger than Comments. Although the Comments team certainly has a lot more depth to it giving it a strong advantage in the human polls.
Actually, looks like I squeaked in there with the pass thinking I was going to get the tie. Now the comments won’t match up with what actually took place, blasted Republicans:-)
I had it all set to tie the posts with my first comment at 5:06pm PST and then pass him with my next column, and then Dane comes along and jacks everything up. Bastard! :-)
The MySQL database isn’t much help in terms of counting, because with all the blogs I’ve imported and deleted, we’re up to comment_id #8892 over there. (Also, comments on the other blogs are in the same database, so the count would be skewed high anyway.) However, MySQL does allow me to get this down to seconds instead of just minutes. And it’s rather close… almost Florida-close. :)
Andrew produced a tie between comments and posts with his “You’ve gotta pay the man first, buddy” comment at 6:06:13 PM. Three seconds later, Dane, intending to produce a tie, instead gave the comments the lead at 6:06:16 PM with “O’ heck, might as well make it a tie for Comments and Posts.” Finally, at 6:07:22 PM, Andrew, apparently not having reloaded the comment screen in the preceding minute, wrote, “And with that, consider yourself passed, Mr. Brendan Loy!” … but I had already been passed, a minute and six seconds earlier.
Me, how is it my fault. This is so Andrew’s fault. Hmm, given the condition of the Database it is a bit tricker to get the numbers out of it. It is possible, but would require a some what complicated query string and run through a php script to count them and I think that is a bit more work than is really necessary.
Fault? CREDIT! More comments than posts means that you’ve got more readers.
As (apparantly) the only semi-regular commentor outside friends and family, I’d take credit myself, but it really goes to the 2002 Trojan football team, and their 38-17 victory in the Orange Bowl. Without the ensuing photo spread, and the Instapundit link, I’d not be here cluttering up the comments today.
You’re right, of course, Doc, I was just kidding about the “competition” between posts and comments. I’m delighted that I have enough frequent visitors to see the comment count grow so high.
Now refresh my memory… the InstaPundit link to you refer to must have been the one referencing my newspaper front-page gallery after the Columbia tragedy… and then you followed the link from there to my Orange Bowl gallery? Aha! See, my blatant self-promotion (in all red text, no less) paid off!
Alas, I see now that the links on that post are broken, because I’ve switched from Blogger to MT since then and I never went back and fixed it… d’oh! Okay, I have a new project…
But for now, I must get back to work! Lunch break’s over! :)
Hmm, maybe it wasn’t an instapundit link, but I’m pretty sure I first found the site from the Orange Bowl posts (And did my part by commenting ). But you know your instalanches better than I; did the Blogfather link to the Orange Bowl coverage?
I’m pretty sure I was dropping by regularly by the time Challenger went down.
Fight on! Beat the Beavers! (everybody seems to be forgetting about them…)
I’ve actually been thinking about how MT organizes posts and sets up links for a while now because of a potential new project.
How moveable type works is it uses pearl and templates to create static pages of, well everything and then uses the database to refresh those pages when ever you change something. The net result of this is a lot of overhead in terms of disk space. One post will certainly be in your database, and then it will also be in your archives, perhaps a single archive, different sections, and perhaps the main blog page. (and pages with lots of extra mark up go to compound this problem) It is not much space on say one or even a hundred posts but storing the data for many thousands of posts redundantly throughout the blog can start to add up (and the time to rebuild a template to change the appearance of a site can then take a really long time). The good news with having pearl build static pages is major savings on the system processor and the resulting increase in speed that you would get by not having to create the page on the fly.
Now, the other option you have is to use PHP (or similar) to create the pages on the fly by querying your database (if it is a compatible database, which MySQL is.) You could in fact create a MT site that uses a MySQL database that ignores the fact that MT has templates and create every page on the fly with PHP and take advantage of the content management back-end that MT provides. Unfortunately the side effect of this system is that it takes more time (and with a large database a lot more time) and a popular site (or page) would have a lot of requests and therefore could become quite processor intensive as it queries the database constantly to produce the same data and slows down everyones ability to access that information.
Now, here is the thing that I have been thinking about. Is there an effective way to combined these two technologies in a way that uses the best of both these technologies (MT using static pages created with pearl, and PHP pages created on the fly) (note to those of you using MT, the back-end interface would not change because you are just changing the way you go about accessing the data that MT puts into your database)?
So what do I mean? Well the idea would be to create a static version of the home page whenever a new post is added but create just about everything else that is not accessed as often dynamically based on a user request.
It sounds good right, you save disk space, and you save processor power and page load times. And if you were working on a brand spanking new site this would be a really easy problem to solve. You just use the MT tag to append the post number into the link to your dynamic php page. (something that would look a bit like this Link to this post In the document itself but then, by editing your .htaccess file, when it receives a link like the one above instead of trying to access a real file at that location it creates a link to a file (any file) and feeds it the computer friendly link with variables. so perhaps the link is changed into “/blog.php?archives=009214″. Now that would be neat eh? You can avoid link rot buy creating rules for how the current file structure is designed (and even older file structures) so no more broken links. Unlimited different archiving structures. Make it easy for people to tweak the links to move throughout your bolg. Google thinks that they are static links so it will go through and index all of those pages making sure you are listed accurately on search engines. Not only that, but there is another thing you can do. If you ever want to go from virtual links to static links you can, without trouble. If you want to change from JSP to PHP and back again every third week you can. And (going back to the goals of this post) you can edit the file so that if there is a really popular post on the site you can change it from dynamic to static without too much trouble by creating another rule in the .htaccess file (note because the server goes to the .htaccees file every time a link is requested you might want to limit the number of “statically archived” posts on the site to make sure the system stays fast. Or use a modified archive structure that does not trigger the archive rule. Then you could even have MT manage the few static archival posts that you want to maintain (probably using a special blog category (that you might even be abel to hide from users with CSS rule)).
Sorry about that, I realize there are probably very few people that read this site that care anything at all about this idea, but it is something that I have been pondering for a while (how to have your cake and eat it too with web-logs) and thinking that perhaps I’m getting closer to how to actually implement such a thing. So, those of you that care let me know what you think, and if you have any ideas in this regard. So there you go a really long answer to something that I strong armed into being a question.
Okay, now I feel silly, I failed to escape the angel brackets around the link examples I used. Therefore they don’t like show up in the post or anything. sorry about that. If you click on them you will see what they were supposed to be, along with a nice error message.
Okay about 50% of that made sense to me. What stands out is it looks like you did a lot of original thinking on this. So I’m wondering, have you been going to the official Movable Type website and looking to see if there are any techie discussion forums? I’m sure there are boards somewhere for people with your know-how who have sat down and pondered this stuff, and maybe there are some answers there. Not that I don’t appreciate the post, but it would seem like you’re talking to the wrong crowd here, except for maybe Brendan. If I were doing this, I would definitely go check out some discussion forums and software boards to bounce my ideas off people and see what else people have been saying, and then come back to Brendan with some concrete suggestions.
:-) I think the ideas need to be worked through a bit more before talking about it on a discussion board (e.g. I need to work up a test bed for it) And it is a bit more comfortable to put out feelers as to the interest for something like this on a friendly location than it is to go out into the great unwashed of the MT discussion boards :-). However, if the idea does start to bear out as something functional I do intend to pass it on to the wider web community.
Rats, I was looking into how MT places information into the database and unfortunately it does not include formating tags unless you place them in the entry. Which means that one of the actions of a php script that would display a post would have to be putting in such tags. This is, unfortunately, a some what tricky function. Ahh, well, I’m going to have to keep thinking about this one.
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December 1st, 2003 at 5:20:09 pm
Nope, I’m afraid you can’t possibly win this battle. Although I would question your strength of schedule numbers. I mean, I think that the Posts strength of schedule would be much stronger than Comments. Although the Comments team certainly has a lot more depth to it giving it a strong advantage in the human polls.
December 1st, 2003 at 6:06:16 pm
O’ heck, might as well make it a tie for Comments and Posts.
December 1st, 2003 at 6:07:22 pm
And with that, consider yourself passed, Mr. Brendan Loy!
December 1st, 2003 at 6:11:07 pm
Actually, looks like I squeaked in there with the pass thinking I was going to get the tie. Now the comments won’t match up with what actually took place, blasted Republicans:-)
December 1st, 2003 at 6:16:16 pm
Of course we will need Brendan to confirm this by checking the database (Which now that he is using MySQL is actually quite easy.)
December 1st, 2003 at 6:17:50 pm
I had it all set to tie the posts with my first comment at 5:06pm PST and then pass him with my next column, and then Dane comes along and jacks everything up. Bastard! :-)
December 1st, 2003 at 6:55:01 pm
The MySQL database isn’t much help in terms of counting, because with all the blogs I’ve imported and deleted, we’re up to comment_id #8892 over there. (Also, comments on the other blogs are in the same database, so the count would be skewed high anyway.) However, MySQL does allow me to get this down to seconds instead of just minutes. And it’s rather close… almost Florida-close. :)
Andrew produced a tie between comments and posts with his “You’ve gotta pay the man first, buddy” comment at 6:06:13 PM. Three seconds later, Dane, intending to produce a tie, instead gave the comments the lead at 6:06:16 PM with “O’ heck, might as well make it a tie for Comments and Posts.” Finally, at 6:07:22 PM, Andrew, apparently not having reloaded the comment screen in the preceding minute, wrote, “And with that, consider yourself passed, Mr. Brendan Loy!” … but I had already been passed, a minute and six seconds earlier.
December 1st, 2003 at 7:13:01 pm
Like I said, Dane effed everything up! :-)
December 1st, 2003 at 8:00:01 pm
Me, how is it my fault. This is so Andrew’s fault. Hmm, given the condition of the Database it is a bit tricker to get the numbers out of it. It is possible, but would require a some what complicated query string and run through a php script to count them and I think that is a bit more work than is really necessary.
December 2nd, 2003 at 4:22:19 am
Well, Comments appears to be up by 10 — 11? — now, presumably as a result of the Comments to this Post on the subject.
“Fraud!” cried the maddened thousands… etc. :)
December 2nd, 2003 at 11:18:29 am
Fault? CREDIT! More comments than posts means that you’ve got more readers.
As (apparantly) the only semi-regular commentor outside friends and family, I’d take credit myself, but it really goes to the 2002 Trojan football team, and their 38-17 victory in the Orange Bowl. Without the ensuing photo spread, and the Instapundit link, I’d not be here cluttering up the comments today.
Congratulations, you’ve hit the tipping point!
December 2nd, 2003 at 12:40:23 pm
You’re right, of course, Doc, I was just kidding about the “competition” between posts and comments. I’m delighted that I have enough frequent visitors to see the comment count grow so high.
Now refresh my memory… the InstaPundit link to you refer to must have been the one referencing my newspaper front-page gallery after the Columbia tragedy… and then you followed the link from there to my Orange Bowl gallery? Aha! See, my blatant self-promotion (in all red text, no less) paid off!
Alas, I see now that the links on that post are broken, because I’ve switched from Blogger to MT since then and I never went back and fixed it… d’oh! Okay, I have a new project…
But for now, I must get back to work! Lunch break’s over! :)
December 2nd, 2003 at 2:47:51 pm
Hmm, maybe it wasn’t an instapundit link, but I’m pretty sure I first found the site from the Orange Bowl posts (And did my part by commenting). But you know your instalanches better than I; did the Blogfather link to the Orange Bowl coverage?
I’m pretty sure I was dropping by regularly by the time Challenger went down.
Fight on! Beat the Beavers! (everybody seems to be forgetting about them…)
December 2nd, 2003 at 4:29:13 pm
Geekey Comment Warning:
I’ve actually been thinking about how MT organizes posts and sets up links for a while now because of a potential new project.
How moveable type works is it uses pearl and templates to create static pages of, well everything and then uses the database to refresh those pages when ever you change something. The net result of this is a lot of overhead in terms of disk space. One post will certainly be in your database, and then it will also be in your archives, perhaps a single archive, different sections, and perhaps the main blog page. (and pages with lots of extra mark up go to compound this problem) It is not much space on say one or even a hundred posts but storing the data for many thousands of posts redundantly throughout the blog can start to add up (and the time to rebuild a template to change the appearance of a site can then take a really long time). The good news with having pearl build static pages is major savings on the system processor and the resulting increase in speed that you would get by not having to create the page on the fly.
Now, the other option you have is to use PHP (or similar) to create the pages on the fly by querying your database (if it is a compatible database, which MySQL is.) You could in fact create a MT site that uses a MySQL database that ignores the fact that MT has templates and create every page on the fly with PHP and take advantage of the content management back-end that MT provides. Unfortunately the side effect of this system is that it takes more time (and with a large database a lot more time) and a popular site (or page) would have a lot of requests and therefore could become quite processor intensive as it queries the database constantly to produce the same data and slows down everyones ability to access that information.
Now, here is the thing that I have been thinking about. Is there an effective way to combined these two technologies in a way that uses the best of both these technologies (MT using static pages created with pearl, and PHP pages created on the fly) (note to those of you using MT, the back-end interface would not change because you are just changing the way you go about accessing the data that MT puts into your database)?
So what do I mean? Well the idea would be to create a static version of the home page whenever a new post is added but create just about everything else that is not accessed as often dynamically based on a user request.
It sounds good right, you save disk space, and you save processor power and page load times. And if you were working on a brand spanking new site this would be a really easy problem to solve. You just use the MT tag to append the post number into the link to your dynamic php page. (something that would look a bit like this Link to this post In the document itself but then, by editing your .htaccess file, when it receives a link like the one above instead of trying to access a real file at that location it creates a link to a file (any file) and feeds it the computer friendly link with variables. so perhaps the link is changed into “/blog.php?archives=009214″. Now that would be neat eh? You can avoid link rot buy creating rules for how the current file structure is designed (and even older file structures) so no more broken links. Unlimited different archiving structures. Make it easy for people to tweak the links to move throughout your bolg. Google thinks that they are static links so it will go through and index all of those pages making sure you are listed accurately on search engines. Not only that, but there is another thing you can do. If you ever want to go from virtual links to static links you can, without trouble. If you want to change from JSP to PHP and back again every third week you can. And (going back to the goals of this post) you can edit the file so that if there is a really popular post on the site you can change it from dynamic to static without too much trouble by creating another rule in the .htaccess file (note because the server goes to the .htaccees file every time a link is requested you might want to limit the number of “statically archived” posts on the site to make sure the system stays fast. Or use a modified archive structure that does not trigger the archive rule. Then you could even have MT manage the few static archival posts that you want to maintain (probably using a special blog category (that you might even be abel to hide from users with CSS rule)).
Sorry about that, I realize there are probably very few people that read this site that care anything at all about this idea, but it is something that I have been pondering for a while (how to have your cake and eat it too with web-logs) and thinking that perhaps I’m getting closer to how to actually implement such a thing. So, those of you that care let me know what you think, and if you have any ideas in this regard. So there you go a really long answer to something that I strong armed into being a question.
December 2nd, 2003 at 4:32:55 pm
Okay, now I feel silly, I failed to escape the angel brackets around the link examples I used. Therefore they don’t like show up in the post or anything. sorry about that. If you click on them you will see what they were supposed to be, along with a nice error message.
December 2nd, 2003 at 4:52:00 pm
Okay about 50% of that made sense to me. What stands out is it looks like you did a lot of original thinking on this. So I’m wondering, have you been going to the official Movable Type website and looking to see if there are any techie discussion forums? I’m sure there are boards somewhere for people with your know-how who have sat down and pondered this stuff, and maybe there are some answers there. Not that I don’t appreciate the post, but it would seem like you’re talking to the wrong crowd here, except for maybe Brendan. If I were doing this, I would definitely go check out some discussion forums and software boards to bounce my ideas off people and see what else people have been saying, and then come back to Brendan with some concrete suggestions.
December 2nd, 2003 at 5:40:21 pm
:-) I think the ideas need to be worked through a bit more before talking about it on a discussion board (e.g. I need to work up a test bed for it) And it is a bit more comfortable to put out feelers as to the interest for something like this on a friendly location than it is to go out into the great unwashed of the MT discussion boards :-). However, if the idea does start to bear out as something functional I do intend to pass it on to the wider web community.
December 2nd, 2003 at 6:53:46 pm
Heh, you come here for friendly discussion? Isn’t your head still sore from all the times I’m bashing it in? :-P
December 2nd, 2003 at 7:00:04 pm
Better than web design forums, they can get really snippy.
December 2nd, 2003 at 10:32:04 pm
Rats, I was looking into how MT places information into the database and unfortunately it does not include formating tags unless you place them in the entry. Which means that one of the actions of a php script that would display a post would have to be putting in such tags. This is, unfortunately, a some what tricky function. Ahh, well, I’m going to have to keep thinking about this one.