Geeklog Forums

I have two Geeklog sites that use the Weather Block on the front and two Geeklog sites that don't. This morning both of the Weather block sites stopped working suddenly. It took me several anxious minutes before I realized that the problem was that the Weather block was waiting in vain for the NOAA server to provide the information it uses. Speaking now in general block terms, not just the Weather Block, is there a way to time how long a block takes to function and if it exceeds a preset number of seconds abandon the effort?

It depends on which functions the block uses to do whatever it's doing and whether those functions have a timeout that you can control somehow. But I guess that is something that authors of add-ons which rely on external services should take into account. I don't see a way how Geeklog could control this since it's basically just calling a function / subroutine ... bye, Dirk

I started playing around with this idea when I released the GL Performance monitor hack. The goal was to create a monitoring capability within Geeklog to measure performance/response times of blocks/plugins. I also added code to alert the site admin when blocks and or plugins were experiencing performance issues (as defined by the site admin). I also had plans to extend the hack to include "self-healing" logic or...disable a block or plugin if response time were sub par.

You can check out the very...very rough code here. You can find more info on where I was going with this here.

My new Chatterblock 2.3 has the iframe mode which allows the block to refresh on it's own. This is independant of the main GL site and other blocks. In fact the main page is presented and then the chatterblock is displayed when in iframe mode. It also has the ability for users to set their own refresh interval for the block. This will be great for blocks like stock and weather and many others so they can be running independent of the main site and refreshing to keep the content updated without the main page having to be manualy refreshed. In this mode, if the block has an error, the main page is not impacted. Yes - this requires users browsers to support iframe but that is becoming less of an issue. This method will address your original posted question as it's now independent of the main page and other blocks. Any errors incountered or delays are self contained. Since the block also has popup alerts, this concept can be great for site admins to have interactive alerts of new postings, or site changes as it's now running free inside Geeklog. I can see developing a site admin block that is monitoring site changes and alerting the admin. Lots of potential ideas using this model now that you don't have to hit refresh. Blaine