Pipedot Status Week 1
Just a quick update on the progress after its first week of life:- Thursday : registered the pipedot.org domain!
- Friday : setup the DNS and mail servers.
- Saturday : Web, database, and memcache servers built up.
- Sunday : Load balancer added to balance between the two webservers. Also finished setting up the HTTPS certificate and IPv6 support.
- Monday : Initial look, logos, icons and CSS design.
- Tuesday : Database-backed stories (no more static placeholders).
- Wednesday : Login system was enabled.
- Thursday : The first poll was posted late Thursday in time for Valentines Day on Friday.
- Saturday : Topics and the Pipe activated.
- Sunday : Threaded comments and user-submitted stories enabled.
The code base is all new (not based on Slashcode) and using modern web technologies (nginx instead of Apache, no Perl CGI, etc...). There are currently six servers plus a load balancer with more webservers available to spin up as needed. Sections of code that are either CPU heavy or database intensive (threaded comments) are able to be memcached to maintain performance.
Stay tuned for the next week of updates!
JavaScript can be ok to use, but I find people try to use to to make flashy things happen for site critical functions, which means if you have JS turned off, or if you use a screen reader, everything is broken. Moderation can be done without JS. It is on SN, but admittedly it doesn't function as well as it does on /., I like how /. automatically deducts the mod points as soon as you chose an option from the drop down rather than having to click the "moderate" button on SN and having the whole page refresh.
I agree with the /. beta thing, they could have done a lot better.