In the wee hours of the dawn...

We'll be doing a little behind-the-scenes work on the site super-early tomorrow, so if you tend to spend time here at odd hours or if you're traipsing in from another time zone, be aware that you'll get a 'Gaia is dreaming' message from 2 am to 4 am MST.

For those of you interested in what's going on, well, we're breaking down a giant table of meta-data into a number of constituent tables so as to increase performance.

Gaia Community, as you might imagine, is far, far more complex than your standard web page; instead of just consisting of a few different elements and images, this site has connections and profiles and posts and photos are all woven together in a vast tapestry of information.

When you log in to your profile, Gaia needs to know to bring up the friends you're connected to and the posts you've made to your blog. She needs to get your library shelved and your quotes compiled and your photos in order and the Groups you've created organized, and to do this not just for a few people, but tens of thousands, all of whom are posting and connecting and reconnecting and sending messages and notes and stories, and not just that, but who are all interconnected as well. It's an exponential and vastly complicated process, and a bit of work for the servers (not to mention the code!), and due to the nature of the interdependence of all our connections and conversations, a tiny glitch in any one of those threads can ripple all throughout the pages. In breaking these tables down, we're making it so that Gaia doesn't need to search through millions and millions of fields to grab one piece of information, but instead can go to a sub-set and thus work a bit more quickly.

I get a bit amazed at the almost neurological intricacy of this community, and amazed, too, at the developers: this site, when it comes down to it, started as just a few typed-out lines of code. Talk about writing a whole world into being...

(And I get all the more amazed to think of all of you who've participated in this writing. It's crazy, hm? All this, flowing from our fingertips onto the keyboard. It's a crazy universe we live in.)

Anyway. We'll be down for a bit whilst working on that, but hopefully it's at an hour that won't interrupt too many postings.

I'll post again soon (we've got news about Plus... gaia.com email addresses, anyone!?) and more about Conversation Week, a few updates about a new goals / values section we're working on, and some polishing of the interior navigation, but for now, just think good thoughts for our hardworking, late-night dev team. They can always use a little extra love. :)

Posted by: Siona