The Vostok blog

Tumblr users can now dress elegant and stylish either in black or white since both versions of the Vostok Theme are available for them. Ricardo Fernández coded them and we included them on the Vostok Theme page along with the css files for comments in case you manage them with Disqus. Ain’t that nice?

(thanks a lot Ricardo!)

WARNING: Here comes a rather technical post. Stay away if you are here just for the fancy videos and occasional eyecandy…

As part of the rebuilding of Planetaki we’ve switched from MySQL databases to MongoDB. It is quite a big change and the results are already noticeable. You can feel the wond in your face when in front of your planet. It’s fast, very fast.

Sam wrote a post about how it’s all set up. The techie inside you will enjoy it. Here are a few excerpts:

Planetaki caches huge amounts of data from posts all over the internet resulting in very large rows. The result is that the traditional database caching and optimisation techniques just aren’t as effective, and Planetaki was getting progressively slower and harder to manage.

[...]

Planetaki now uses a hybrid solution for storing data. The complex feeds and their entries are stored in MongoDB, and user data is stored in a traditional Postgresql database. This allows us to split the system into two parts, on one side we have the feed “reaping”, and on the other the website which mainly accesses the tables of data.

Read the full article: Planetaki powered by MongoDB

A videosummary of all the projects resulted from Desafío Abredatos 2010 (yeah, that 48h hackathon with public data):

PS: We have good news on that. Wait until tomorrow, would you?