The Lair

There is a school of thought out there, simply expressed, that says fewer features are better. This is classic 37 Signals ethos. If you’ve never heard of 37 Signals, well … long story short, they focus on minimalism in their online software offerings. Both figuratively and literally, you’re not missing much if you’ve not heard of them before. But their software is still very shiny and functional and most importantly, it works.

This is hardly a new concept; see paying more for fewer features. But from my point of view, putting in fewer features focuses the mind wonderfully on things that are most important (or core) to the application. It forces me to think about what I want to see in there, rather than running around with a gigantic shopping trolley in the feature supermarket and having a nasty shock at checkout.

So, fewer features eh? For the past day or so, I’ve been busily rewriting Ach (http://www.achcharu.org) into something a little bit faster, a little bit easier to manage and last mentioned but certainly first in order of importance, a little bit more flexible. So, what did I do? I actually cut features. There’ve been a grand total of 8 blocked blog entries out of some 7000 odd so far; so clearly this is a feature which isn’t needed often. It went out the window. Colour themes? Makes things less boring but not many people have a need for different themes (besides myself, that is) so it went out. Polls? Amusing, but not in the first cut. Fetch history and tag histories? Not yet, but those will probably stay in. But as a result of the revamp in how entries are stored; this will be far easier to write and maintain. Big Blogger? Will be back soon, with even more privacy intruding details about the blogging habits of the neighbourhood. In fact, not being able to implement Big Blogger properly prompted the thoughts of a rewrite in the first place.

But for now, I’m only going to do three things. Fetch stuff off feeds, allow people to tag stuff and err… wait, that’s only two things. That’s it. Oh and link stories together; that’s new to this rewrite of Ach. So the sneak preview is going to be absolutely boring, this is a screen grab of yours truly testing punctuation in tags using Ach2 (most punctuation will work unhindered in tags now, unless it triggers a hax0r alert).

Oh and pretty darn important:
Current Ach pagesize: ~200kb with about 50% of the load being JavaScript.
Current Ach2 pagesize: ~30kb, but with the same number of blog entries and near identical functionality. This will probably grow to around ~60kb when it’s done but a third of the existing pageload size is decent, if I say so myself. Proof positive that obsessing over pagesize and concentrating on performance can occasionally yield results. It never seemed such a big deal till I had to go use Ach over a SLT ADSL connection myself. Now I can see why shaving the kilobytes off the pagesize is a good idea.

Oh and a completely unrelated bonus, I inadvertently discovered that yes, it is possible to scrobble music to last.fm from two machines simultaneously. Both requests don’t go through at once; of course… One (the scrobble request which hits the server last) is denied with a “wrong username or password” message. But the nifty caching feature built into the last.fm client allows several machines to simul-scrobble without a problem. Why I felt compelled to investigate this possibility, I’m not really sure - but the more you know, eh?