Web site issues
on Sunday April 24, 2005 09:42PM
With the new server for the web site, we hoped the pages would load faster. A month ago, we identified an issue and solved it so the home page loaded faster. But the events pages were still slow - for the same reason, but it was too time consuming to fix each page. On Saturday, the "expert" finally looked at it, and cured the problem with a little change. All events web pages need to know who you are, so they can tell you if you are registered for the events on the page. The "look up who you are" process was completely inefficient, and has now been fixed and the events pages are now fast as they should be.
But in that simple fix, it lost track of who some of you were, so when you logged in you were rejected with a zope error. That was fixed this afternoon, I hope.
The final "slow pages" are those that you need to see when you "register" for events. We want the system to "autofill" as much of your information as possible, and it turns out that because the server had to look thru 11,000 sets of information that had been typed in, it took a long time to decide what to "autofill" for you when you tried to register. So we have turned that off, the registration pages have speeded up, but you may see less information automatically filled in. The programmer will be upgrading the computer to newer software, and we expect to try a different "autofill system" - just have the computer fill in the same information that you filled in the last time you registered - not from "internet cookies" or "sessions" but by looking up the last information you typed in when you registered - that can be done really quickly!
Bottom line - we are trying to perfect the system to make it fast and easy for everybody. Thank you for putting up with the amateur led volunteer effort.