On Wed, 30 Apr 2003 17:02:31 -0500 (CDT), John R. Owens
<jowens.wiki(a)ghiapet.homeip.net> gave utterance to the following:
On Wed, 30 Apr 2003, Geoffrey Thomas wrote:
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 14:47:20 -0700 (PDT)
From: Geoffrey Thomas <geoffreyerffoeg(a)yahoo.com>
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Caching
A suggestion for caching: the home page, [[Main
Page]], never should include links to nonexistent
pages. Could that be cached (in standard stylesheet),
e.g., as /index.html? I would think that page is
accessed very frequently and that caching it would
save some database work for other pages.
Actually, it seems to happen rather often that someone or something
formerly rather obscure suddenly hits the headlines, or dies, and
suddenly appears on the [[Main Page]]. Of course, usually at least a stub
is made very soon after, but I don't think it qualifies as a "never". And
it's good to be able to see whether or not the article does exist yet
when you see the Main Page, of course.
For instance, right now, the first two "Recent deaths" on the English
Wikipedia, Bernard Katz & Nina Simone, both didn't have any page at all
until they died.
I presume that it is one of the admin jobs to select and update the items
that appear on the "In the news" "Recent deaths" etc. link lists. That
is
likely to happen twice a day at most, probably once. What would happen
under a caching system is that the interface to gegenerate those components
simply rewrites the cached version of the page.
What we would lose with caching, however, is indicators such as the
asterisk showing that someone has edited your talk page if you are logged
in. Perhaps (if people don't scream blue murder about popups), logged in
users could have a little popup console where these dynamic things happen.
For Opera/Mozilla it could be written as a panel or sidebar.
--
Using M2, Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: