The new CSS design is now live, and seems to be attracting a big split between people:

• Some hate it.
• Some love it.

I'm becoming increasingly pessimistic. Still at least this design renders correctly in all the browsers tested so far.

A few people have contributed minor fixups which I've encorporated so my thanks to them. (I think I'm still sitting on some changes - but my mailbox is backing up badly; so it'll take me a while to get through them all).

Averaging around 50,000 hits a day on the site now. Which is good.

I've now using Danga's Memcached to cache items in memory for faster access. (Weblog entries, articles, static pages, etc).

I remember the last time I enabled this I had problems (mostly with comments upon articles), but so far it appears to be working properly.

Here are the current statistics:

$ make cache
STAT get_hits 142763
STAT get_misses 1710

142,763 items fetched from the cache instead of the database - and 1720 cache misses (which are added to the memory cache after their lookup fails).

Several things have been changed internally, which was a large part of the reason behind the redesign. I figured:

• The site templates must all be updated anyway.
• CSS is the way of the future ...

So .. that explains that, right?

Anyway some of the more obvious changes are :

• Weblog owners may now edit or delete their entries if they wish.
• Weblog owners may delete any comments upon their entries if they consider them abusive/spammy/bad.
  • I'm hoping this won't happen - but I can see there is a need for it.
• Article titles on the front-page are now links; even though they don't look like it.
• Validation updates.
• Better consistancy.
• A seperate administrative interface for dealing with pending articles and polls - along with a new poll submissions page.