Digg Down Again
Update: As Dan pointed out on the comments Digg is having some issues with the new comment system
Joe Stump: Today Digg launched it ’s redesign of the comment system, which was programmed by yours truly. The following post describes all the technical tidbits that went into the new comment system. Steve had coded the API and the decision was made that the new comments system would use Digg’s public API. Comment threads would be loaded dynamically using AJAX and JSON. All commenting, editing, etc. would happen via AJAX. The API ended up making the PHP code behind the scenes relatively painless. Each page loads using two small calls; one to figure out how many comments are on a story and another to fetch the first 50 or so comments.
It was during design that Micah and I also plotted to remove script.aculo.us and replace it with the smaller jQuery library. The entire comment system is, in fact, a series of jQuery plugins. Probably the coolest, technically speaking, portion of the new comments is the manner in which most of the page is created.
No longer do we create static HTML in PHP and send you a huge HTML page. Instead we give you the basics and, via AJAX/JSON, we make requests to the API and dynamically create the DOM using the FlyDOM jQuery plugin.
Threads would be zipping in and out, we’d be creating 90% of the HTML dynamically in the DOM from JSON, posting and editing over AJAX. If you notice, on the initial page load there aren’t any forms anywhere in the DOM. Those, also, are created dynamically on request. An interesting side effect to this is that there’s about 4x as much JavaScript code on the new comments than there is PHP. The major technical and design changes of comments should lead to faster load times, less bandwidth being eaten up and, hopefully, a better user experience."
Jay Adelson: "We had some issues that we're sorting out before we try rolling that out again.
Kevin Rose: quick post to let you know that in the midst of going live with some back-end upgrades as well as our new comments system, the site has had a longer than expected outage tonight. We’re deep into the fixes and should have them done soon. In the meantime, we don’t want to interrupt your Digging any longer so we’re reverting to the current version of the site until we get the kinks worked out.
Digg has been down for several hours. Wonder what has happened and the title bar reads (out of service) as usual. There were no news of an update occurring tonight.
"We'll be back shortly."
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