At Monday, Hendrik informed me that the delicous links in team.sPace are no longer updated. This is very bad and critical for the system's use. As I am currently at the adaptive hypermedia conference in Hannover, I had not much time to debug the code on the server. While I was reasoning, why the delicous links are no longer updated, I saw a connection to something I observed last weekend when I refactored the ReScope code, where I detected that the location of delicious' feed API have changed.

In my last posting I reported about the first version of ReScope. This tool seeks to help delicious users reflecting on their web-readings. After finishing the second prototype I started to play around and spied some people's tagging interests. That way I found out that watching Adobe's tag cloud might unveil the real hot topics and products of the company. I also found out by talkin to perigin and kjetil on IRC, that interpreting the data presented by ReScope correctly can be quite difficult for others than the author of the tag cloud; and finally I came across a long tail related problem of ReScope's tag cloud visualisation in general. In this posting I discuss this problem and two approaches of solving it.

This week I was busy preparing another reflection tool for experimental use. This time it is called ReScope and a little tool for self-reflection based on the personal tagging habits on del.icio.us. The second prototype is now available for live-use at my experimental server at the OUNL. Those who check my homepage, will recognize the look of the tool from there. In fact, the version on my personal homepage was the first prototype. The current version is a complete rewrite of the first approach and will address the needs of scientific testing.

This morning I looked at team.sPace and checked the runtime behavior a bit. While profiling a javascript error came to my attention: I accessed the DOM member variable textContent as it would be a function. This is a really stupid error. Correcting this typo fixes the annoyance that is was not possible to edit the personal profile, which has been reported by Hendrik some time ago.

Today I managed to get back to the team.sPod code. I spend half the afternoon to re-factor some of Dirk's code for browsing the team.sPace contributions on the iPhone and on the touchpod. By accident I found out that with the latest version of safari web applications can also take full advantage of touch gestures on these two iProducts. So instead of refactoring the interface towards the latest wireframes, Dirk and I spent the rest of the afternoon to add some finger food to team.sPod.

It has been a long time since I posted the last time. A lot of things have happened, in the meantime. However, the most important event has happened today: I corrected the bad manners of team.sPace. Now the load times are again in a reasonable range - or in other words, team.sPace has become usable again. The actual fix was extremely simple, less than 50 lines of code in the front-end and the back-end. The only thing was convincing myself to get over the old school thinking of monolithic CGI code. In this article I explain why team.sPace was so slow and what it took to fix it.