(no subject)

[sorcyress]

Hokay, elljay is kinda stupid.

I posted a private entry this morning. Later in the day, I decided to make it all public-like. So I filter it right, and edit the time to be in the afternoon.

Elljay apparently went "fuck this" and decided to keep showing it during the morning, which means that anyone who read their flist between me posting it private and making it public, did not see said entry.

(I've checked, and while it lists it's time as 5:30, it doesn't show up then in my flist. This is stupid.)

So yeah. here, read.. Normally, I would not be doing this, but this is spilt emo, and a bit of explaining to my current state of mind, and the general sort of thing I'd be filling people in on if their pants were bankrupt.

~Sor
MOOP!

Comments

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

Friends pages and communities show entries in order of when they're actually posted, rather than their user-set timestamps. It's a sometimes-annoying feature, but it does mean you don't need to skip a hundred forward-dated friends only banners every time you want to check your friends page.

[kdsorceress.livejournal.com]

Ahhh.

Hrm. Now I'm trying to decide how good a trade-off that would be.

I read my flist backwards, unless I've been keeping obsessively up to date, by which I mean, unless I suspect there's only a dozen or so new entries, I go back and read everything in chronological order. So the flist is just set up badly for me in general.

Butyeah.

~Sor

[marcmagus]

I would *love* it if there were a good way to view the friends list in forward order. The one thing I hate about the whole blog world is the convention of putting the most-recent post first.

I understand why they do it, it just annoys me. And when they have an actual identity for me as LJ does, there's no reason they can't remember what I last saw and show me stuff in forward-chronological order starting with that tag. Just do a datestamp or message-id of the last time I loaded my own friends page while logged in . . . not perfect, but good enough for most purposes.

[marcmagus]

I always assumed the reason for that was for efficiency. Sorting it on message ID, which is presumably the primary key in the database, can probably be significantly optimized over trying to sort on date (especially since their timezone handling seems to be . . . quirky).

I assume that's the same reason that you switch to calendar view once you go far enough back in the history of a journal, and lose friend list if you go too far back.

I could be completely wrong, though, as I'm definitely neither an LJ dev nor a DBA.

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

Quite possibly; though, since dates are probably stored as very big integers, there's likely not much difference between the two approaches. And sorting on message id would depend on how they handle them between different users and clusters.

Efficiency is definitely what's behind limiting the entries it fetches for a 'recent' view.

[marcmagus]

If dates are stored as anything other than 64-bit time_t they had better have a very good reason. I was more thinking that fetching from the database ordered on the pkey should be faster than fetching ordered on some other field. Although I'd find it very plausible if someone said that's a case of premature optimization.

I'd always thought message IDs to be unique and ordered across the system, but not only am I completely making that up, but I've just fairly convincingly demonstrated that it's not that simple by looking at a few of them.

In fact . . . ignore everything I said in my first post, I'm wrong. A quick check of my flist shows that the messages do not appear ordered on message id.

Perhaps they're doing some clever caching which would be invalidated if you could change the sort field and they didn't want to deal with it? (Really, it's going to change so infrequently that any efficiency argument other than programmer efficiency is pretty bogus.)

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

*tests*

So the numbers on posts are their actual itemids. Well, there you go.

LJ does do lots of caching, so that's a very good possibility; and, in practice, the likelihood that a given user will want to sort on some other field is incredibly small. And in practice, it is should be reasonably trivial to sort entries in a theme layer before printing them.

And here I'd get into the HTML coding style implications of writing out entries in reverse order, but it's LJ. All of the layouts already fail miserably from that perspective.

[harena.livejournal.com]

i think W wanted to post a comment to that entry but has been called away on Driving Josh Duty (may all the gods that give love and richness smile upon him!) so was interrupted... Just so you will know when it turns up 2 weeks from now, that's why ;)