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2010/05/08: You may have noticed some changes ...

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In case you hadn'd noticed, I did a revamp of the site's look. The font is slightly smaller, the sidebar will now appear in more places, and I have added support for the possibility of putting up ads if this ever became necessary. Also, I've made the RSS-feed-reader a customized addon rather than part of the server itself.

I've also started experimentation with caching the results of SQL queries, just to ease the load on the MySQL server. I'm starting with the "newest pages" and "newest comments" lists in the sidebar, on the basis that you seriously don't need to do a new SQL query for that every single time a new page gets loaded. The same goes for a couple of other kinds of queries I have floating around, but this is something of a one-thing-at-a-time deal ...

5 Comments (auto-closed) (rss feed)

Tarquin

Honestly, for the queries you mention (especially the "newest pages" one, but site activity is low enough that it'll work for the "newest comments" list too), I wouldn't bother with queries at page-generation time at all. Just use a static include file, and update that automatically when you add a new page or when a new comment is posted.

It doesn't work so well for high-traffic sites, but for stuff where the results only change occasionally, it should drop your database load quite a bit. (It does mean a slightly less "pure" site design, though.)

Dizzy H. Slightly Voided

Yeah, creating-static-includes-that-get-updated-when-something-changes is how I'm doing it, actually.

I suppose I could create a static-include which contains the data for every single page and comment on the site, and have the PHP parse it as one big array however it wants to ...

Ryumaru

Hi, just a fellow Touhou fan. Didn't know exactly where to put this, so I just thought that the newest blog post should work.

Anyway, I have a small favor to ask. For my Flash Animation class I'm animating an old, unpublished comic I made about how hard Touhou is. To do this, I need some sound effects, but I don't have a freaking clue where to find them. Since you did that thing with the death SFX and the MGS sound byte, I thought you might be able to help. You wouldn't happen to know where I could find some of the SFX from the games (Imperishable Night especially) up for free download, would you?

Dizzy H. Slightly Voided

You could've emailed me directly. ;)

The simplest thing to do would be to extract them yourself, but here you go.

Ryumaru

Oh, thanks. Well, now I feel like a dork....