More by this author - idea

Baak · Post by **Baak** » Wed Apr 11, 2007 12:46 am

Would it be possible to up the number of entries under "More by this author"? Perhaps to seven? I know you can click the "More by this author" text, but five seems slightly too small.

Another idea: Make the entire list of "More by this author" randomly displayed each time so if they have say, 12 other things, it will display 5 or 7 of these randomly each time.

What I notice for the items I've posted right now is that the Triskelion map never appears on any of them. Randomly jumbling the list each time it is displayed could be really neat.

Just a suggestion.

Post by **Myrd** » Wed Apr 11, 2007 12:05 pm

It's a good idea. Right now the problem is that list is cached for performance reasons (with the item's description and some (but not all) other stuff on the show item page). That's why the list doesn't get updated on old items right now. That's not to say that it can't be changed...

Baak · Post by **Baak** » Tue May 15, 2007 11:44 am

Wasn't sure if the idea of "randomizing" the lists under "More by..." is still in the making, but here's an example of why I think it's a good idea:

From my "Flare Dorfs" entry on The Tain you see the following:

Pick "Trebuchets" and you will see the following:

Not only are these two lists identical, but you can go to every plugin on either list and you will never see the entry for "Triskelion" appear on these lists. That's odd - it's like it only does the top five and that's it. You'd have to pick the "More by ..." link itself to find it. How many people are going to think these lists are all that's available? Half? Most?

In addition, right now the "More by this Group" is only showing entries made by me since I was the one who formed the group. I'd much prefer to have this randomized over the entire group - otherwise it's not very useful information. In fact, right now it's completely redundant.

For what it's worth, I'm reluctant to add more plugins because they're just going to be "buried" and invisible in the lists.

Post by **Myrd** » Tue May 15, 2007 7:42 pm

Okay, I've made the order criteria random, HOWEVER:

For now, things are still cached - so you'll see the old items on the list until the items get updated, which will produce a new random list (and cache it).

In the future, I'll consider making the lists non-cached, but that would mean deleting the whole existing cache (which will make The Tain slow until it gets rebuilt (pages are cached as they're accessed)).

Baak · Post by **Baak** » Wed May 16, 2007 12:00 am

Thanks, Myrd!

Just curious: what's the underlying language behind The Tain? Is this the reason the pages have to be cached in order to do this?

Post by **TarousZars** » Wed May 16, 2007 1:16 am

Ruby on Rails.

And caching just makes things faster.

Baak · Post by **Baak** » Wed May 16, 2007 1:29 am

Interesting.

So it's not something that is done like so:

* Get list of plugins from db (once by author, once by group)
* Randomly order list
* Display portion (first X entries) of said list

Seems like this would have nothing to do with the rest of the page?

But then, I've never used RoR.

Post by **Myrd** » Wed May 16, 2007 2:55 pm

You can cache any portion of a page (or a full page). Currently, the cached sections include the related list.

vinylrake · Post by **vinylrake** » Wed May 23, 2007 3:46 pm

Myrd wrote:You can cache any portion of a page (or a full page). Currently, the cached sections include the related list.

Is there a way to specify how frequently the cache gets dumped/refreshed? Or is it once-cached-always-cached - at least until reboot or system maintenance time?

Post by **Myrd** » Wed May 23, 2007 3:48 pm

We can clear specific cache section programmatically... For example, if a review is added, we clear caches that contain the item's rating...