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To: Mario :-) who wrote (22918)	10/13/2005 1:53:12 PM
From: SI Bob	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 32883

Mario, I can't really give ETA's on those because they're a few items on a HUGE to-do list and I don't even know when I can get any particular ones started. By way of example, my current project, which was completely unanticipated, is to try to free up as much headroom as possible on Investors Hub's db server so its realtime full-text search gets a little closer to realtime. It lags by up to half an hour now, which is not acceptable. Concurrent with that project, I'm trying to spec out a new machine to take over index/search for iHub (and possibly SI) and when it arrives, I'll have to set it up and move index/search functionality off the existing db box and onto the new machine. While also dealing with things like ad sales/management (which takes up a huge chunk of my time). Not really making excuses. Giving reasons that something that may only take an hour to implement once started ("Keep" in batch mode, for example) is taking so long to get to. There's a huge list of such items. And because an item like that simply replaces 3 mouseclicks and an Enter with a single mouseclick, it's never bubbled up to the top of the list yet. When I want to Keep a message while I'm reading in batch mode, I click the mouse into the "Reply #" box, hit Enter to see that message in single-msg mode, hit Keep, then hit the Back button a couple of times to return to where I was in the batch. And, actually, the cost of that one would be a bit more than an hour of my time and there'd be substantial cost on the web-serving side of things. If I simply put a "Keep" button on every message in batch mode then had it take you back to the same batch after the message was flagged, you'd be back at the top of the page, faced with the annoyance of having to scroll back down to where you were. Only way around that is to put anchor tags at each message in batch mode and upon your return from the Keep routine, take you to the anchor tag associated with that particular message. Or as an alternative, I could resort to Javascript (I've intentionally avoided doing so throughout the site) and pass a parm to the Keep routine letting it know it was called from Batch mode, in which case it'd send your browser back a page after it does its thing. But then the "Keep" wouldn't toggle to "UnKeep", which would be yet another annoyance. Your issue with the Keep functionality while reading messages by author is also another that can be addressed with the Back button. And another example of something that may appear easy for a programmer to do, but really is far from it. Any time a routine gets multiple entry/exit points, the complexity of the routine goes up an order of magnitude. As for my role, programming-wise, I'm a combination of author and maintenance programmer. iHub was a functional but simplistic system when I took over about 3 years ago, and most of the features that've been added since have been mine. I wrote this version of Silicon Investor from scratch. Speaking of which, another biggie project is an Investors Hub rewrite in ASP.NET (the language I used for SI) because it's slowly but surely approaching a scale that simply won't work anymore in classic ASP. But by the time I expect to get started on that project, I fully expect to have a full-time, ASP.NET-specific programmer working here to help out. If I could afford to hire one right now (they're far more expensive than I am), I'd do so in a heartbeat and we'd get worked through the backlog of new features a lot more quickly. What you bring up about being able to embed charts in SI messages is a really good example of why I want to hire someone already expert in ASP.NET. I learned it while writing this version of SI, so I don't consider myself an expert, and the chart function (and #reply-, etc) all need the RegExp() function, which was cumbersome at best in ASP, but I haven't found a large enough chunk of time yet that I can invest in simply learning it in ASPX. Every time I start trying to figure it out, some other priority calls me away before the fog has really lifted much.

To: Mario :-) who wrote (22918)	10/14/2005 2:43:16 AM
From: d:oug	Respond to of 32883

re: Index get lost [with] Keep Mario, If your pc is Windows base and you are using the browser IE, then there is another browser called Firefox that has the ability to do Tabs and prevent what you describe as happening. It actually will happen, but you can have it happen elsewhere, and keep the same environment(state) as if you didn't do a Keep. The new Netscape browser may be available and have Tabs. For sure the Opera browser always had Tabs, plus much more. Doug