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Go to the source: The Market Ticker

The Market Ticker has now completed the merge between the former Tickerforum comment area and the Ticker itself.  All threads back to roughly mid-2008 have been merged, such that comments appears inline under the Market Ticker post itself.  The old Ticker area on the forum has been set to read-only and demoted – there are about 300 old threads that could not be automatically converted, and as I get time I will go through them and manually match and convert them - most do, in fact, have matches in the Market Ticker but date to the old Blogspot format where in many cases the subject lines do not match and thus can’t be automatically "sussed out."

This has been a goal for several months – to put the forum and Ticker on one system, so as to provide better tracking on the web statistics side and to provide better coherence between comments and the content of the blog.  There was significant software work required to support this, as the forum software (AKCS-WWW) was never intended at the outset to be a blog-publishing package.

After a lot of code-perusal and thought, however, it became obvious that a forum is really, in many respects, a superset of a blog in terms of functionality, and that the template and database-driven format is really quite ideal for a blog.  As such I started, back in late 2009, thinking about what it would take to merge the two.

What you have now is the culmination of that codebase.  Serendipity, which I have used since the middle of 2008 when I came off Blogspot (Google’s blog hosting solution), was nice, but it was a performance pig (being written in PHP) and paid little attention to the issues that an enterprise-robust system should pay attention to, particularly when it comes to high-availability and load-distributed systems.  Bluntly, Seredipity can’t handle that, and indeed the coders never even considered that for replication purposes you must have primary keys on all database tables – even if they’re nothing more than an "ordinal" sequence column that you never really need to use.

Indeed, many of the instances of "slowdown mania" that the system experienced under peak load were traced to Serendipity.  Throwing hardware at a problem does work, but it’s not the right answer.  Fixing the code is, if you can.

Readers should enjoy a much-more robust and "liquid" experience now on the Ticker, including in the comment process.   Your Tickerforum login ID will work on the Market Ticker threads, as they share a unified login base, but you do need to sign in separately, as they are on separate domains and will remain so.  The system will automatically forward you around as is necessary, and in addition the "icon" for each of the areas is distinct to help you keep track of where you are.

Enjoy the upgrade, and if you have comments, feel free to post them here!