The fuel of Interstate: One year later | Hacker News Reader

The fuel of Interstate: One year later

blog.interstateapp.com

40 pointssim0n14 comments

I know I'm a minority, but visiting your main site in Opera is a very unpleasant experience.

Wow - the main site has to be one of the most Opera-hostile pages I've ever seen. Everything flickers as I move the mouse over the text, and the login pops in and out for no apparent reason...

As long as the mouse stays out of the page it displays just fine, though.

Wow - that shouldn't be happening, thanks for letting us know. I'll take a look in to it now.

Edit: Fixed, there was a silly HTML error introduced in a recent commit which only Opera didn't like. Sorry about that.

Out of curiosity, what was it? Sounds like an interesting edge case for us Opera-lovers.

The bulk of it was caused by the fact we had an element which was only visible on-hover (a drop-down sign in menu) and within that element was an unclosed <label> tag. Because the label was unclosed, the rest of the page was being trapped in the <label> element which meant the lower half of the page only displayed when the parent element was visible (thus causing the flickering effect as the element was shown/hidden).

Nice! Thanks for the quick fix.

Our use of Redis for caching has somewhat reduced and we’re now using Memcached a lot more aggressively than we were a year ago.

Could you say why you decided to migrate from Redis to Memcached for caching?

A lot of the caching we're doing is just plain key/value and so it was easier to just increase our usage of Memcached (we were already using Memcached at the time). If we need to store more complex structures in memory (e.g. lists) then Redis will be high on the list of choices.

Since I wrote this piece, we've been looking in to reworking our notifications and activity feeds so there's a good possibility that we will be looking in to Redis again.

Cool, but I'm not sure I get the point. This post just seems like a way to attract attention to Interstate without giving anything back to the reader.

The post is simply to offer a behind-the-scenes look at our app and to see the shiny technologies we're using.

The main problem that I have with PHP the language is the ugliness and weirdness of the syntax. Something like CoffeeScript for PHP, that compiles to PHP (but with nicer syntax), could help alleviate that.

That would break the biggest advantage of PHP (which granted, is already fading), which is the ability to immediately and effortlessly deploy scripts to basically any web host in the universe.

Note: Though somewhat off-topic, another project from BakedCode is offline -- prompt.im

Yeah, unfortunately we were using an early open-source project to handle the real-time aspect of Prompt and when we needed to upgrade socket.io (one of the project's dependencies) to support the newer Web Socket protocol, it broke the app.

We'll hopefully get some time to fix Prompt soon!

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