VB Wire News missing

[mendhak]

Is it missing for anyone else?

[mendhak]

Oh, it's back. Don't I look like an idiot now.

[techgnome]

Gone.... I think either Ross Peroit may be running the service today....

I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth tho... quite often it's the source of my delays in loading VBF pages.

-tgq

[brad jones]

It seems to be randomly showing up. That indicates a server is probably out of synch and not getting the feed.....

Thanks for the 'heads up'.

Brad!

[JPnyc]

We put out an APB on it. Police found it tied up in someone's basement.

[dclamp]

it only hides from me sometimes... but most of the time i see it

[RobDog888]

I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth tho... quite often it's the source of my delays in loading VBF pages.

-tgq

Yes, I have posted about when its missing the page was delayed too before. I wish the timeout on it could be reduced so if the feed is not responding withing 5-10 secs it will abandon the news request.

[penagate]

The VBWire feed is a JavaScript include. This means that it excludes users who don't have JavaScript enabled or supported. It could be improved, without further excluding any users, by using an AJAX request to retrieve the feed contents and DOM manipulation to add the links to the page rather than document.write. This would stop it from holding up the rest of the page if the feed is unavailable.

It could be further improved, if possible, by caching the feed on the VBForums server, serving the cached version to users, and updating it server-side every 10 minutes or so using a cron job. This would be a transparent change for users, and would stop the feed from ever appearing to break: at worst, updates might be delayed, rather than the feed not showing at all. It would also make the feed appear to users without JavaScript support, meaning a wider audience for VBWire articles.

[RobDog888]

That sounds like an excellent solution but I wonder if it could be done without editing the template or php file(s). Now if there was a hook to utilize in place of hacking the files then that would be best.