For those we lost, We will not forget 09/11/2001 “Our God given unalienable rights are given to us all as individuals. They tell us what we may do for ourselves, and they are the embodiment of liberty. The so-called rights that government gives to some of us are parcelled out to select groups as classes. They tell us what one class of people may require another to do for them, and they are the very essence of slavery.”
— Perri Nelson, February 9, 2010

A bheil Gàidhlig agaibh?

Blogrolling.com server woes

Published Sun, Nov 26 2006 11:00 PM
Technorati Tags: Computers and Internet, Software Development, Blogging

The blogrolling.com servers have gotten less responsive over the last several days. Some of the blogs I read have made note of the problems, complaining that it takes considerable time for their pages to render because of the problems. I've noticed that late at night, when I have the most freedom to read blogs that the servers seem to be at a total standstill.

For my web site, I have a solution to the problem. After looking at the code to fetch the raw feed from blogrolling.com for a given blogroll, I've written an ASP.NET server control that can load a standard blogrolling.com blogroll (I haven't bothered for reciprolls), cache the output, and render it into the sidebar on the server, instead of on the client.

I've plugged this control into my sidebar everywhere I was relying on client-side JavaScript to render my blogrolls. The result appears identical to what was being rendered when I used the client-side scripts, but the pages render considerably faster. I've tried to set a reasonable cache lifetime for the blogrolls on the site, a compromise between picking up recent updates when a blog pings blogrolling.com and ensuring a decent response time on the website.

My web server has a lot more bandwidth available to it than my browser does, so this shouldn't have impacted server response times too much. Besides, when I used the script-based method, every single page load results in over a dozen hits to blogrolling.com. Now, with the blogrolls cached on my server, if page hits come frequently enough (and they do when I'm working on the site at night) the number of hits to blogrolling.com from my website alone should go down.

If anyone knows how to cache data from a web site using PHP and plug it into Wordpress or Blogger blogs, let me know. Some of my friends in the blogosphere could probably benefit from this too.

Linked at 123beta.

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Butch responded with:

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Perri, did you get the tb?

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