

The fuel of Interstate: One year later - sim0n
http://blog.interstateapp.com/post/10699086100/the-fuel-of-interstate-one-year-later

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mrspandex
I know I'm a minority, but visiting your main site in Opera is a very
unpleasant experience.

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ramchip
Wow - the main site has to be one of the most Opera-hostile pages I've ever
seen. Everything flickers as I move the mouse over the text, and the login
pops in and out for no apparent reason...

As long as the mouse stays out of the page it displays just fine, though.

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sim0n
Wow - that shouldn't be happening, thanks for letting us know. I'll take a
look in to it now.

Edit: Fixed, there was a silly HTML error introduced in a recent commit which
only Opera didn't like. Sorry about that.

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SkyMarshal
Out of curiosity, what was it? Sounds like an interesting edge case for us
Opera-lovers.

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sim0n
The bulk of it was caused by the fact we had an element which was only visible
on-hover (a drop-down sign in menu) and within that element was an unclosed
<label> tag. Because the label was unclosed, the rest of the page was being
trapped in the <label> element which meant the lower half of the page only
displayed when the parent element was visible (thus causing the flickering
effect as the element was shown/hidden).

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samstokes
_Our use of Redis for caching has somewhat reduced and we’re now using
Memcached a lot more aggressively than we were a year ago._

Could you say why you decided to migrate from Redis to Memcached for caching?

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sim0n
A lot of the caching we're doing is just plain key/value and so it was easier
to just increase our usage of Memcached (we were already using Memcached at
the time). If we need to store more complex structures in memory (e.g. lists)
then Redis will be high on the list of choices.

Since I wrote this piece, we've been looking in to reworking our notifications
and activity feeds so there's a good possibility that we will be looking in to
Redis again.

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rbranson
Cool, but I'm not sure I get the point. This post just seems like a way to
attract attention to Interstate without giving anything back to the reader.

~~~
sim0n
The post is simply to offer a behind-the-scenes look at our app and to see the
shiny technologies we're using.

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LeafStorm
The main problem that I have with PHP the language is the ugliness and
weirdness of the syntax. Something like CoffeeScript for PHP, that compiles to
PHP (but with nicer syntax), could help alleviate that.

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baddox
That would break the biggest advantage of PHP (which granted, is already
fading), which is the ability to immediately and effortlessly deploy scripts
to basically any web host in the universe.

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davidandgoliath
Note: Though somewhat off-topic, another project from BakedCode is offline --
prompt.im

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sim0n
Yeah, unfortunately we were using an early open-source project to handle the
real-time aspect of Prompt and when we needed to upgrade socket.io (one of the
project's dependencies) to support the newer Web Socket protocol, it broke the
app.

We'll hopefully get some time to fix Prompt soon!

