Not again… Another Site Update.

A couple of people have been emailing me with messages along the lines of “hey, my screen’s full of errors instead of informative news-y goodness.” Details follow.

I always knew that most of this site was designed in a somewhat less-than-perfect way, but it finally came round and bit me in the arse.


The error messages were mostly along the lines of “Warning: unable to connect to MySQL database in (some source file) on line 42” and then a whole lot of other not-so-informative things.


There may be some vague correlation between those messages and the fact that the average page view on bureau42.com requires something like 30 separate database queries. Just maybe.


I can’t always promise to have the latest-and-greatest news, though of course we try. But darnit, my site’s gonna be up and available and stable, as much as I can help it…


So, at about two o’clock this morning, I wrote a caching system for the “heaviest” parts of pages.


Here’s the part that will affect you, the reader: Sometimes you’ll post a comment, but it won’t be immediately reflected in all the places it could be. Comments will still be visible almost immediately, but the “Current Headlines” bar and comment counts (as seen on other sites that use the RDF data) may lag behind by a few minutes. Your comment IS there, I promise; these little cosmetic things will save a LOT of load on the database, and make life better for everyone.


We now return you to your regularly-scheduled lurking.

2 replies on “Not again… Another Site Update.”

  1. uh… well…
    Okay, so now the errors are being replaced with new and different errors. :-)

    PHP doesn’t always do everything in the way I want it to. I’m
    doing my darnedest to clean everything up.

    “I assure you, we’re open.”

    • Re: uh… well…

      “I assure you, we’re open.”

      But why do you smell like shoe polish?

Comments are closed.