OpenCore Software

Robert and I spent much of the day optimizing the mailing list feed.  Formerly, it was sorted by date of latest reply, with the number of replies displayed and a link to the original post and the latest reply.  The idea was/is that the summary page should just give a brief overview and therefore show all the threads separately (if two of the most recent replies are to the same original message, this is shown only once in the feed).  Unfortunately, the way listen currently is, doing this meant getting all of the top-level threads and traversing them (only brains, but still).  Correction of a simple oversight on my part brought the time for the opencore project down from about 110s to 30s (there are tens of thousands of messages on these lists), but this is still too slow and will cause a proxy error.

 So we took out the traversal to find the thread beginning/end and just display the 5 most recent messages regardless of thread.  This brought things down to 5s, but now its different from the design spec of how its displayed.

 Which got me to thinking…

What I was given was a definitive but tentative plan for how the feeds would work.  The blog feed displays the top 5 messages regardless of the most recent comments (the number of which are displayed).  The wiki feed displays the five most recently changed/created pages (there are no “responses” to a wiki page, at least yet).  The listen feed is speced to display the activity of the five most recent threads across all mailing lists (making it a feed aggregator as well as a feed provider).  The team feed displays the members sorted by whether they have a portrait or not, though debate has occurred whether additionally the admins should be displayed on top, or sorting users randomly, or…

It would be nice to have the adaptation controllable with parameters.  How the feed is sorted could be such a parameter, or maybe several parameters if sorting by multiple fields (”i want all admins on top, then members with pictures, with some randomness thrown in”).

I hope we can soon figure out our feed story going forward.  Its come a long way, but still lots left to do.