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May 18, 2011

Time-Travelers' Meeting Delayed...

Just a quick note to apologize for commenters' date-of-comment changing after each added comment.

There appears to be a logic-bug in the blog software. It's a peculiar data-writing method that "BlogEngine" employs. The interface writes to a file cache before committing to the database. Then it compares each entry against the database as a parity to test for updates or deletions, after which it deletes all comments in the database for the post then iterates through the list re-inserting each again using the cache as validation. And finally, it updates the file contents from the database to ensure the two are in sync. (This also explains why sometimes there are delays for content changes in the blog as the HTTP server does not know about the cache update and may return a 304 status.)
But to further complicate things, there is a server-time offset value to adjust the displayed time in hours differently from the time zone of the where the server physically resides. Sounds good, except by 'syncing' the two data-sources, every time a new entry is made the previous time-stamps get incremented yet again.


Anyway, I changed the offset to zero. This may make the timestamp value less accurate to the author's time zone, but it should mean they won't be traveling with Dr. Who any longer. At long last, if you notice the dates are still messing up, please let me know - even if you inform me yesterday.

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