The TekTag Blog

Interns Wanted

We're planning on adding some exciting new features to TekTag and are looking for a few interns to join the team.  Time and schedule are flexible.  If you are a college student interested in social media and would like some real world experience, drop us a line.  A technical bent is an advantage, though not required.

TJ

Announcing TekTag Tipline Beta

Wanted to let everyone know about a new feature we've got in Beta called Tipline.  The general idea is that you ask a question and then ask other people to suggest an answer.  The catch is that what we are looking for is a link to another site - a blog, a howto site, a forum entry - that answers the question

Why do this?  Why not just a forum?  Well, we could have done a forum, but we've gotten feedback that people are tired of forums, and tired of the back and forth that spins out of control.  We also wanted to encourage people to add links with brief descriptions, to try and take advantage of existing work.

Lastly, we wanted to give the asker a chance to definitively say whether or not the suggested tip or howto solved the problem.  Much like a tech support system, the asker basically closes the issue.  In doing so, the question turns into an answer and is left for all of us to find later in TekTag or via Google.

If you are a how to or tip site owner or blogger, Tipline can be a great way for you to promote your tips.  Or, if you are having writer's block, it is a good place to get ideas for tips to write.  We do plan on adding an RSS feed once we get all the kinks worked out.

So, please, take a look.  Feedback is not only welcome, it's a mandate.

Enhanced Tip of the Day

Greetings again.  Wanted to let you all know about some enhancements we made to Tip of the Day.  We've been busier than a Super Bowl ad production crew around here.

Just as a refresher, Tip of the Day is the the highest rated, most viewed tip, as voted by the users.  Along with our redesign, we've now given Tip of the Day more prominent position on the home page.  A few other new things:

• Dedicated Tip of the Day Page - You can now get to the Tip of the Day at http://www.tektag.com/tip_of_the_day
• Weekly View - You will now see the tips for the current week, in familiar blog-style reverse chronological order.  This allows you to see all the week's tips at a glance, with the most current on top
• E-mail Option - Via Feedburner, you can now get the Tip of the Day e-mailed to you (you can also get RSS, if you prefer).  This will send you the Tip of the Day once a day to your Inbox.  We understand Feedburner is working on a weekly digest version of the e-mail service.  We'll keep an eye on that and offer weekly roundups when available.

Let us know what you think.

TJ

TekTag Facelift

The bandages are off; the swelling is almost gone.  We're happy to unveil our new look, as well as some enhanced functionality.

We spent six months working out many of the kinks on the back end, and we felt it was time for us to look a little prettier.  So what do you think?  Please let us know.

BTW, you will notice a new section called Tipline.  It's not fully functional yet - we just put it up with links to help in our layout process (it's not like we have a staff to do this stuff for us, you know, and we're admittedly CSS part timers).

Stay tuned for future posts with more in-depth info on our changes.

TekTag Maintenance

We're moving to our new design, moving a bunch of pages, so please stand by.  We should complete everything over the weekend.  The site will be functional, but probably will see a few small layout issues while we move.

TJ

Calling All Reviewers - New "Review" Type

Just a quick note to let you know about a small but significant change to our Types.  We changed 'Distro' to 'Review.'  We decided that there are much better places for tracking new distros, and that our users were more interested in the value added commentary and opinion on new releases.

So now you will notice Review in the bookmark tool, as below:

If you blog about new releases, please think of TekTag as a place to post your reviews.

All for now.  Stay tuned, though.  We're very excited about our upcoming facelift.  Should be here in time for Christmas.

Watch Out for domapi.js Ajax Performance Problems - a TekTag True Story

We had been getting complaints about the performance of TekTag a few months ago.  Sometimes it was okay, sometimes it was really, really bad.  Even stranger, though we had been growing, we hadn't been growing that much.  So we wondered - what could it be?

We started by looking at the usual suspects.  Something must be wrong with the network or the server, since we hadn't changed any significant functionality.  We checked, but nothing there.  Then we thought maybe it was a bad query that had slipped by.  We did a bit of MySQL tuning, but still nothing.  We'd read about the need for caching in apps like ours, but we didn't want to just try it.  And then one of our guys came across the problem - domapi.js.

domapi.js is a cross-browser DHTML library for adding client side GUI features, commonly used for adding AJAX.  We used it for only a few little things - the little ratings gears and some other stuff.  But it seems that very frequently, when we generated pages, the browser would download a whole bunch of  domapi.js components that we didn't need.  So even though we had the page ready to go, the TekTag server had to wait until we finished downloading the remaining domapi.js components to the browser before rendering.

If you use domapi.js and are experiencing slow performance, look for a domapi.loadUnit ("ajax") call and check it out.  Ours used to hang a lot, in addition to taking a long time.

I'm sure there are workarounds for this, and we're not saying never to use domapi.js.  Just be careful and make sure to check it. 

In our case, we used so little of the functionality, we just rewrote a few scripts and don't need domapi.js anymore.  We also decided to start using SAJAX. Seems to be working fine.

 

TekTag Speed Improvements

We just finished making some changes/improvements to TekTag that have greatly improved the page load speed.  We've been having some problems in this area, something our friend the HowTo Geek was the first to spot.

Tell us what you think.  Later this week we'll post some details of what we did technically.  Part of the reason it took us so long to fix is that the problem was not at all what we suspected at first...

TJ

Bookmark Spam - Please Stay Tuned

Monday mornings.  New week.  Fresh cup o coffee.  And...lots of link spam.  And I thought spammers were lazy scum.  Who knew they work weekends?

Anyway, just a brief note to let everyone know some new anti-link spam measures will be put into place in our next code push.  So please stay tuned.

The price of success...

What We're Up To

It's been a little while since I've posted anything major here, so just a brief ACK to let you know we're still hard at work (okay, this is a part time job for us, so we're hard at work part of the time).  TekTag traffic continues to grow.  So we're happy about that.  And we have a bunch of feature requests queued up.  But right now we're working on some performance issues which are getting in the way of things.  After that we'll get back to some cool new features.  And then we're planning a little work on the layout and design, but not until we get below 100K on Alexa - first function, then design.

Later,

TJ