the default antville skins contain some direct references to antville.org which should be replaced by the url of the antville home. i noticed it on the root page and in confirmation mails. i'm going to change it for my server. are you interested in my modified skins?

let me know if there other occurances. what can we do with the buttons? sites hosted on my server are not residents of antville, are they?

I just played around with the antville database and noticed that it looks like there are no indices at all on the ACCESS table! (Except for the primary key, that is.) For example, simply querying for Access data for one weblog takes 10 seconds:

mysql> select count(*) from ACCESS where WEBLOG_ID=1;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|     1614 |
+----------+
1 row in set (10.25 sec)

whereas a similar query takes 0.1 seconds on the TEXT table, which has an index on WEBLOG_ID:

mysql> select count(*) from TEXT where WEBLOG_ID=1;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|       69 |
+----------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)

This suspicion is also consistent with the antville_indexes.sql file which doesn't have any entries for the ACCESS table.

I propose we add indices to the relevant columns of the ACCESS table. If that doesn't help enough, we can still delete older records, but I think if we are able to keep all the access history in DB, that would be even better.

PS: for another cool Ausbaustufe of Referrer-Logs have a look at www.disenchanted.com (via LNGR). This is a per-page referrer tracker that really implements bidirectional links. Interestingly, it seems to also have to solved a performance problem because the referrers page is broken down into smaller portions. I think it wouldn't be too hard to implement this for antville if we added the target URL, or maybe better the target story id, to the ACCESS table and a listReferrers macro to the story prototype... just thinking out loud...

PPS: I just noticed that the table definition for ACCESS has a lot of mediumtext columns:

#----------------------------
# Table structure for ACCESS
#----------------------------

create table ACCESS (
   ID bigint(20) not null auto_increment,
   WEBLOG_ID bigint(20),
   REFERRER mediumtext,
   IP mediumtext,
   URL mediumtext,
   PATH mediumtext,
   `ACTION` mediumtext,
   BROWSER mediumtext,
   `DATE` datetime,
   unique ID (ID)
);

Is this really a good thing performance- and space-wise? wouldn't it be better to have varchar(256) and varchar(512) in most places?