Code, code, code

[elz]

Deploy day at AO3 today! We're upgrading from Ruby 1.8 to 1.9, from Rails 2 to Rails 3, and from Apache and Passenger to Nginx and Unicorn. We're also replacing our authorization and authentication systems, changing our html parsing and sanitizing, and updating/replacing a whole bunch of third-party plugins and gems, as well as updating nearly every file in the codebase to work with the new version of Rails. The site will be down for an extended period of time while all the underlying software is switched over.

So, that's not stressful at all, haha! On the plus side: unicorns!

Basically, the number of users and works and the amount of traffic keeps increasing, and we hope to do some hardware upgrades, but in the meantime, we're doing what we can to improve performance and maintainability. (Plug: if you happen to know a lot about MySQL or memcached and you'd like to help us improve our system, we will love you and throw roses at your feet!) An enormous amount of work has gone into this deploy, and I feel like I did barely any of it - yay, team! And the yuletiders who've been helping out with testing are beyond awesome.

My goal for the next couple of weeks: see how much I can get done in terms of filtering and browsing. The filters are both unwieldy and a big drain on performance, so we've been looking to replace them for ages, and the upgrade should facilitate that. And we've been brainstorming about browsing for eons as well - its time has come! *resolve face* I try to use the archive as much as I can, and those things drive me crazy as well. Maybe more so than other people, even, since I stop to yell at myself every time I get frustrated. :)

Comments

Re: <3

[onceamy]

How accessible is typing in tags, though? I think something visual is needed, even though I understand the performance issues.

(I use the filters a fair bit, and I'm definitely one of the 'see what's out there' crowd.)

Re: <3

[onceamy]

Also, I've seen a fair bit of "Delicious is good filtering done well", and I'd like to say, Delicious is unaccessible to me -- there are too many mouse-driven events. My arms get tired from fibro, and I'm quite the keyboard user.

Re: <3

[lim]

Amy, if you have mousing issues I recommend you switch to Google Chrome and install Vimium. It's what panrubius uses.

Re: <3

[onceamy]

I'm an Emacs girl -- I use emacs editing of textboxes and have YakShave installed in Chrome. Thank you anyway!

Re: <3

[lim]

If you have a solution, why can't you use delicious? With Vimium, panrubius can use delicious and he cannot use a mouse at all. What is the problem?

(This is not a combative question, I am genuinely interested for accessibility design reasons.)

Re: <3

[onceamy]

Because it's not a perfect solution. It's been awhile, but I remember hating the post new bookmark interface, because it was hard to find, and too lengthy to use (the toolbar, as you can imagine, wasn't a great choice). Sometimes all I wanted was to plug in a link and click submit. I remember trying to delete a section of bookmarks (which was all of my bookmarks at the time, since I imported them and changed my mind) and having to go through them page by page, selecting all of them, and then deleting them. Which was wasteful, and as I didn't have the keyboard navigation I have now (Chrome for Linux didn't exist then), it was also painful. There was way too much text on the page, and this upset my Asperger's brain. I need visual aids in the way of graphics, and too much text leads to mental overload on my part.

(I could go back and point out more things that were unaccessible to me, but I don't know how much detail you want. All I can say is that I'm not a fan of delicious' attempts to browse -- the lists, like the AO3, become unwieldy, and the 'bundling' is awkward to use. I remember trying to set it up and getting frustrated at how much clicking was involved.)

Re: <3

[lim]

/me nodsnodsnods

That's really useful, thank you! <3