guys, I wanted to present this idea and see what everyone's opinions are. I am working to design some improvements in our caching system and one of my current hangups is the fact that we render weblog pages differently when a user is logged in. Why does that matter?
Well, if a weblog has 100 entries then we know for sure that there are at least 101 unique pages for that weblog. 100 permalinks + 1 main page. Since currently we render the page differently if the weblog owner is logged in, then that means we now know there are at least 202 unique pages for that weblog. Ok, so what? Well, if you are a large site like jRoller or blogs.sun.com with say 2000 bloggers then the difference is now between 202,000 pages and 404,000 pages. The difference between caching 202,000 pages and 404,000 pages is quite a lot. Now, if there was a very good reason to maintain those extra 202,000 pages then I would be all for it, but my feeling is that there is only a marginally good reason for doing this. The *only* person who benefits from the pages with "edit" links is the weblog owner. That means we would be caching 101 extra pages per weblog (double the normal amount), just to benefit a single person. This seems silly when the user could just as easily login to the editing interface and accomplish the same things. Personally, I don't login and go to my own weblog page to use those "edit" links, so I would prefer to ditch them and know that my cache now has twice as much room as it did before. We could try doing something fancy like caching only parts of pages, but that is currently made difficult by the fact that weblogs are fully rendered by velocity templates and so we don't have much opportunity to implant caching hooks where we really want to. I haven't worked with too many other blogging apps, but my guess is that very few of them have that same feature which offers "edit" links right on your weblog. e.g., any site the does static page generation would be out. It's possible that we could make this a configurable feature which would be on by default. That way large sites could disable it if they want, but we wouldn't be taking it away from everyone. Anyways, I wanted to try and feel out how many people really like/use those "edit" links which show up on their weblog when they are logged in. I have never used them so I wouldn't care much if they were gone. -- Allen
