Memories Documented Status update

1. I implemented an additional anti-spam stage the depends on specific patters to make decisions. It has enough intelligence to block and ban spam from spammer sources based on content and behavior, and not only their source. So far, it has been very successful
   Over the past year or so, 0 spam has passed through the system which I like to call "Qwaider Shield". It has over 1.8 Million IPs of potential spammers (6 times the number of IP's monitored by Akesmet). And has blocked about over 133k spam attempts since I started this back in August 2006
2. I implemented a number of caching enhancements. The site was becoming exceedingly slow to the point that it broke the 8 second golden rule (If the site loads in more than 8 seconds, it would cause people to get annoyed and leave it. Here are the caching enhancements:
   1. The RSS Feed viewer on the side now caches the whole feed locally at the server. And updates the content once every hour
   2. All the heavy queries (like that on the left side that shows statistics) are also being run once an hour, and cached locally in two stages. Once in the database (for historical/statistical benefit) and once in the application itself in memory
      The same applies to "Recent Comments", but this one is more frequently updated. Every time a new comment is posted.
   3. All the Gravatar icons are also being cached locally (I noticed that it's the slowest part in the whole page to load, and I had to do something about it, so I started caching it all locally). Here's the fun part: If gravatar server itself goes down for up to 10 days, I can still have the gravatar Icons show up completely unaffected. But the negative side is that it might take up to 4 days, for your new gravatar to show up (Unless you tell me and I can manually do it for you)
3. Visually I have added lighbox which allows pictures to be displayed with beautiful effects 
4. On the administrative side there has been a number of enhancements
   1. Article creation now has the ability to "Save without publishing"
   2. While editing a new article, now you have two new options. You can "Save and continue editing" or "Spike" the article (or, just change it's publish date)
      • TO DO: Save changes without refreshing page
   3. The admin now has the ability to view: Recent visitors (and where), Top commenters(and comment count), and finally Top visitors (and #of visits)
5. The new caching features allowed me enough cycles to add the statistics you see in the side bar. I might add more. (If you have any ideas about this, let me know)
6. Linkbacks have also been implemented (in a way that is different than that of wordpress), they're there, but I like to keep them out of the way at the bottom of the articles.
7. I also implemented a cool "Reverse trackback" feature. But I talked about that earlier
8. I also implemented an RSS feed for comments (for the whole blog) or for separate articles. Unlike blogspot, these are not ATOM based, these are all RSS2.0. And unlike wordpress, these are as granular as per-article. (And seem to be very popular)

I guess that is it for the changes. There are other minor tweaks here and there, but those are the highlights.

I know that some of the things here have been there in wordpress for a million years, but again, this is not wordpress, and I'm adding things as I need them.

Anyway, enjoy the different taste of Memories Documented.