• News
• New
• Index
• About

Been a while with no news!

A few note worthy things happen last week.

Ranks

The first round of automatic promotions have begun. Every 10 days of using the site, a member earns a new rank.

Also, we've added in 3 ranks we missed, bringing the total number of ranks to 37! Many thanks to CaptainBrain for compiling the rank info. ^_^

Books / Guides

A new feature that allows easily creating, updating and maintain guide books has been made available to admins. Once we have some guides worth reading, I'll make an announcement. I hope to explain much of how the site works, what features the site has, and provide examples and guidelines using this new books feature.

Non-Human Characters

Perhaps the biggest change! We've taken yet another step towards our goal of having all animated characters in our database.

Currently, the Non-Human DB is broken into a few categories.

1. Animals
2. Non-Human
3. In Armor
4. Manga

To use, in the Main Search panel near the bottom of it, select a Type .

I kinda like browsing the animals. Amazing how many of them are iconic characters in certain series. I'm glad we can finally add them!

The manga characters will be used for Black and White images. This could give us a head start on indexing the latest characters.

Bash Scripting


Always wanted something like that. Now I can open all the code I'm working on with the same command I use to edit in bulk.

kate *tags*
k *tags*

:)

Who Board

Also updated the Who's This Character Board yesterday.

Mainly CSS improvements. But also expanded the mod panel to have a Broken Link section. And removed the 0's from the ID's in the mod panel.

Still need to run another pass on it. Make use of the inputted mod info.

And some layout tweaks were made. Splitting the parent and child posts into different frames.

Uh, hopefully I didn't miss any frame containers.

Profiles

Admins can now give out admin levels using the profile browsing.

I'm amazed how many members have added profiles. Never expected it to be a popular feature. Guess I'll work some more improvements into it.

Prefs

did some work on drafting preference settings. no real progress yet. but eventually, PM Notification emails will be opt-in rather than automatic.

JList

added a small JList button to the site. i love the stuff they sell. but with the high yen, and expensive shipping ... maybe i'll just buy a calendar in time for christmas. haha

Added back Dueteragonist as a Role.

Seems to be the only fit for some characters, such as L from Death Note.

Also updated one of our table css templates, to have two types of on hover colors. One for the TR and another for the TD. Seems useful when editing, but possibly annoying while browsing. I may have to split it into two templates.

Seems about a month since lighttpd 1.4.29 was released. I might upgrade to it later this month.

27893 www 1 44 0 21508K 4376K kqread 0 1:00 0.00% lighttpd

.VS.

89898 www 1 44 0 29584K 12844K kqread 1 169:23 0.00% lighttpd
89230 www 1 44 0 33612K 16792K kqread 4 53:19 0.00% lighttpd
89229 www 1 44 0 33612K 16760K kqread 0 53:04 0.00% lighttpd
89231 www 1 44 0 33612K 16888K kqread 0 53:02 0.00% lighttpd
89232 www 1 44 0 33612K 17088K kqread 1 53:01 0.00% lighttpd
89233 www 1 44 0 33612K 16948K kqread 1 52:55 0.00% lighttpd
58413 www 1 44 0 24464K 8192K kqread 1 21:33 0.00% lighttpd


See those tight CPU usage times? 5 of them. Firewall level round-robin configs are awesome. The low end CPU time is for our "throttled users". The high end is the main web server. One again, the 5 in round-robin config are our image servers.

First one is running on the dev server at home, hence the very low memory, cpu and everything. hah Not much of a test of stability. I might start one image server running the new version, see how that goes. Then upgrade everything.

Noticed today a lot of the Character and Anime view counters were slowing down the site.

Especially when new characters are added, it can take an average of 1 second to rebuild the indexes. A lot of the errors tho were for cases taking around 10 seconds to complete.

While I would like to code an extendable database framework in C, it's a project that should take upwards of a week, and one I'd like to do concurrently with a Binary Tree module ... which I still lack.

Anyways, the Views are expendable. They generate themselves, after all. THat's why I can code a risky replacement which could lose all data. And it's why I can change the storage engine from InnoDB to memory. I had tried different indexes, but it was kinda like an idiot pressing all the buttons on a remote to change the channel. I did more harm than good. The memory storage engine should never take more than a second to complete any operation of this fixed data set. Even without proper indexes.


And another update on the stats server memory usage.

Seems to have stabilized now.

73375 rei 1 45 1 19112K 15608K accept 1 113:36 0.00% ss

19MB max allocated, and 15MB in use. Not bad at all.


Hopefully later this month I can start on the next version of the Stats Server.

Feature requests include:
- Binary Tree Indexes
- export to disk
- load from file
- dynamic table frameworks