(for future reference, that is, without speculating on why or why not someone may have made decisions in the past, but if someone runs into a similar problem in the future)
If:
a) you're running a web application on top of Arc, and
b) you have some very long pages that are taking a long time to render, and
c) it's a page that you actually want to be able display to your users
...then there are less drastic alternatives to kicking the page off the front page:
- you can increase caching (at the cost of the displayed page being a bit more out of date)
- break the page up into parts and add "next" and "prev" links
Knowing the code was written with a news site in mind, you could also theorize (or speculate, which ever makes you happier) that the author (aka pg) would value both the quality and currency of the content over pouring coding efforts into handling of overly active, and by that time, older posts.
All speculation of course. I'm just suggesting that, often, there are simple reasons for the choices made behind these kinds of decisions.
All the ideas you list are great ideas. It's funny though, even I spent a bunch of time writing a blogging platform and I still have not bothered to put paging into the listings. I figure at my current rate of posts, it will take me a year before I'll need to worry about it. There are things we should do, in our ideal world, and then there's what we need to do relative to all other things. So, again, I suggest that maybe the reasons for these kinds decisions can often be much simpler than we think. There's not always some elusive statistical computation with all kinds attention and detail poured into them.
[edit1] ignore the below point... point format tricked me up reading on my ultra small screen :)
I don't fully understand what this point has to do with anything:
I like the work you did, but how does this fit into the discussion or your comment? It seems out of place.
[edit2] Also I used to like the fact that this forum allowed for editing within the first hour. I could correct my mistakes before, I figured, anyone had time to even read them, lol... but, that's not working anymore and trying to respond to changing posts kinda sucks.
I wish this forum had a "save as draft" feature! Maybe I'll just write it somewhere else first.
I don't fully understand what this point has to do with anything: - provide a runnable example
If you have a web application that is running too slowly and you want help, then you make it possible for other people to help you if you provide a runnable example that demonstrates it running too slowly.
