06/05/2004 06:34:16

I've just finished completing the first phase of a number of reworks involving the current beta version of the code for the Presentation Engine. First off a number of bugs which appeared in the 3.1 BETA have been fixed. These bugs were mostly constrained to the Admin sections of the site so unless you've downloaded the code and tried it out for yourself - you likely never noticed these bugs. Secondly a lot of internal rework regarding the way the application stores information has been performed. Without getting too technical lets just say that in older versions of the Presentation Engine I stored data in a certain way because it simply didn't matter due to the way I had designed the application. In the case of the new redesigned .NET version - it does make quite the difference.

Thirdly I've been doing a lot of work with Page Caching in an effort to keep the processing power required for this site to a minimum. This functionality has been disabled in the live version of this code on this site due to the fact that the kinks have not been entirely worked out of it yet.

Finally I've created some scripts which provide for the ability to retrieve an XML listing of the top news items available at the site. Simply click on this link to get a sample of just one of my planned XML features. As always - if the application crashes or doesn't appear to work as the result of this new code please feel free to drop me an email and let me know.

Update: Another code refresh has been performed. The entire caching idea for the page has been reworked and most of it is currently active here on the site. Instead of caching whole pages - I decided instead to reduce strain on the piddly access database by generating XML files that are used to fill in most of the contents of the pages here. These XML cache files are generated each time the application starts and whenever the data associated with those files is updated in the database. As a result of this - the exportnewstoxml.aspx page has now been removed. You can access an slightly less friendly XML feed of the news by clicking right here . If you want to check out all of the quotes I'm drawing from to generate the front page, click right here (careful this xml file is almost a megabyte in size). There are many other cache files as well but they are not likely not going to contain the kind of information most people would be directy interested in. More updates are coming so stay tuned!