Forum:Biostar Release 1.2.17 (Updated Feb 18, 2013): Speed Optimizations

Question

[Istvan Albert]

BioStar 1.2.17, Feb 18, 2013

We have added a number of optimizations to improve the site performance. Our unofficial benchmark is to reduce page creation to under one second. We have also made a number of changes to the static data serving: all transmitted content is now compressed and the templates are cached within the server. Combined these should lead to a noticeable improvement in the page loading times.

Uptime/performance monitoring service reports can be accessed at http://stats.pingdom.com/euhoj9nvjeiq

BioStar 1.2.15, Feb 1, 2013

Two new sections added to the user profile. Upvoted Posts and Supporters

The former shows a subset of a user's posts that have recently received upvotes. The latter shows a subset of the users that have recently voted for posts created by the user. The userlist is both randomized and is only shown if a user has at least 10 upvotes.

BioStar 1.2.13, Jan 17, 2013

We added the ability to restrict posts by time interval as well as attributes such as votes, views etc. Two new categories have been added "Best Of" which is just a way to quickly find the best posts of the week. The second category is Forum where meta-discussions can take place.

If you see odd layout then you may need to refresh your CSS: Hold shift and click reload to clear the old version out of your cache.

Or click the CSS and press reload after it has been loaded http://www.biostars.org/static/biostar.less.css

We will make a change so that this will not be necessary in the future.

[Manu Prestat]

Nice to see who likes my posts in the new "supporters" section. But I found a weirdness, in my case: among my supporters, two of them appear twice. I'm wondering if it has something to do with merged accounts.

[Istvan Albert]

no that just indicates two votes from that person - each supporter image corresponds to one vote.

I am planning to consolidate that to to show counts - it just a tad bit tricky in that one needs to select on an aggregated value that is only known once the query has been run - I am sure it is possible but my SQL skills are pretty rudimentary

[Manu Prestat]

OK, I see. Humility is your force ;-)

[aidan-budd]

Thanks for getting these changes in!

A suggestion - for the "Upvoted Posts" list, it might be nice to see already in the list format the number of Upvotes associated with each row of the list - out of nosiness I was clicking through a few of these on my profiles to check this, would help to get an overview by having this info there without having to click through to them.

[Istvan Albert]

that's is the first number there in the front ;-) - although I can see now why that it is easy to miss. Our minds are trained to think that the number in front of an item is some sort of list counter. I will move it to the end in the next update.

[aidan-budd]

Doh! Can't believe I missed that. Thanks :)

[aidan-budd]

Might be cute to be able to sort by date of post/number of votes.

[Istvan Albert]

that gets a little tricky because requires aggregation over all votes grouped authors of posts - making that work in an efficient way needs some extra planning

Answer 1

[lh3]

I see the tag sidebar now. Personally, I prefer tag cloud (i.e. more frequently used tags in larger font sizes), as it gives my eyes more information at a glance. I guess it should not be hard to implement? What do others think about tag cloud?

[Istvan Albert]

yes, we can most likely do that too, we already have the count information there - the easiest would probably be to go with a javascript library - I'll look into the options

[Istvan Albert]

I added the first draft for the tag cloud - I need to think about scaling a bit more to make the font-sizes scale a little more evenly

[lh3]

Thanks. That looks much better now. With tag cloud, you can show much more tags with less space between them. Perhaps you may also consider to change the alpha/weight of color (i.e. more frequent tags are darker while less used ones are in lighter color). I think the wiki example looks nice. Don't know what others are thinking.

Answer 2

[Manu Prestat]

I took a look at the "jobs" section today, and found it was not convenient to have posts sorted by activity. Especially for that topic, I woud imagine the most recent ones at the top.

[Istvan Albert]

they should be ordered the same way as all other posts and all filters/limits should apply - except the first post that was sponsored and is marked as such