Design tweaks

I’ve been toying slightly with the design recently, and I just noticed today that it’s pretty obvious that almost any browsing I do happens in Firefox. The site (well top menu anyway) looks awful in Internet Explorer – auch. Better fix that some time in 2005.

Recovery 404

So I thought I did a decent job of cleaning up and recovering the site after the evil crash a few months ago. Browsing through the 404 (file-not-found) logs sadly tells a different story. Damn. I was hoping to be fully recovered by New Years Eve. That’s probably a little too ambitious.

Protocol relative linking

An odd discovery today – if you don’t specify a protocol in your links, the browser apparently suppose it’s the same (be that http or https) as the current page. You can se it in action on Slashdot by viewing their source – none of the regular links has protocol specification – they just start with two slashes and the hostname (ie. //netfactory.dk/).

In the case of Slashdot I suppose they don’t use it to save bandwidth, but in most cases it’s probably useless.

Mysql: (date) functions and indexes

Mysql is usually pretty fast by default, but to keep performance to the max sometimes requires knowledge on how mysql works and how to write queries that does their job most efficiently. Today we ran across a simple example which illustrates that mysql’s ability to use an index depends on the way you write the query. Let’s make a simple table and add an index on the date column:

create table members (
	m_id integer auto_increment primary key,
	m_name char(20),
	m_since date not null
);

create index ix_m_since on members (m_since);