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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (167369)	5/24/2006 10:26:54 AM
From: SI Bob	Respond to of 793931

I'm trying to remember why I did it without the http:// in the first place. I'm pretty sure the chart feature already existed on iHub before I came aboard, and though there's a lot of legacy code in there that's really inefficient at the scale it's at now but I've left alone because of the enormity of the task of redoing it, I do remember that I looked at the chart thing in-depth and made a conscious decision to leave it working largely as-is except for writing a more efficient parsing/unparsing function for it to use. Which is why I took the weird route of converting [ chart] to <img src= when storing it in the database. It made sense on iHub because it's such a busy site (it flows about 5-6 times as much traffic as SI) I had to do anything and everything to make read_msg.asp as light as possible. Including not overloading it with parsing. We don't have that problem on SI and because I purposely wrote it in such a way that we can always add an extra webserver anytime we need it (can't on iHub unless we use a load-balancer), I need to store the chart tags in their raw format and parse them at message-display time. And am planning to get started on that as soon as the other hands on my time let go. I'm not optimistic it'll be soon enough for my liking. But so long as the site is functional, I have to take care of the business first; the site second. Dave noticed right away that I as doing the chart routine bass-ackwards here. I cut/pasted most of it from iHub and it didn't occur to me at the time that it's done bass-ackwards on iHub simply for the sake of making sure I didn't add any extra work to the site's most-used routine. I do occasionally forget that on iHub, I'm forced to make the database do most of the work and walk on eggshells around the webserver, but in SI's case, I can beat the webserver like a rented mule, and if it ever can't pull the load, extra mules are comparatively inexpensive and are really easy to hitch up. A project that's at the top of the priority list right now (besides finishing the chart function here) is getting iHub's new, much more powerful webserver into production. Didn't get to put even a second's worth of work into that yesterday. Anyway, unless I can remember a valid (usually meaning security-related) reason to not allow the leading http:// (and none occurs to me right now) in the tag, I'll certainly make sure that the chart function works with and without it. Along with a number of other things, including trying once again to make them work in Preview. I put a lot of time into trying to make that possible on iHub, but the problem was that the spellchecker would insert font tags into the chart string (because it contains what it considered typos) and the Preview function there is such a tall house of cards, even the simplest changes often break message-posting in unexpected ways. We don't have that problem here. Preview is definitely one of the things I nailed pretty well here, so I'm optimistic I won't break anything by making sure the spell-checker doesn't see or doesn't mess with chart tags.