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Advanced Search Features A MilkandCookies query is broken up into terms and operators. Terms There are two types of terms: Single Terms and Phrases. A Single Term is a single word such as banana. A Phrase is a group of words surrounded by double quotes such as "All Your Base Are Belong To Us". Multiple terms can be combined together with operators to form a more complex query (see below). Operators Operators allow terms to be combined through logic operators. Lucene supports AND, "+", OR, NOT and "-" as operators. Note: Operators must be ALL CAPS. OR The OR operator is the default conjunction operator. This means that if there is no operator between two terms, the OR operator is used. The OR operator links two terms and finds a matching document if either of the terms exist in a document. This is equivalent to a union using sets. The symbol || can be used in place of the word OR. To search for documents that contain either "peanut butter" or just "peanut" use either of these equivalent queries: "peanut butter" peanut "peanut butter" OR peanut AND The AND operator matches documents where both terms exist anywhere in the text of a single document. This is equivalent to an intersection using sets. The symbol && can be used in place of the word AND. To search for documents that contain "peanut butter" and "jelly time" use the query: "peanut butter" AND "jelly time" + The "+" or required operator requires that the term after the "+" symbol exist somewhere in a the field of a single document. To search for documents that must contain "monkey" and may contain "peanut butter" use the query: +monkey peanut butter NOT The NOT operator excludes documents that contain the term after NOT. This is equivalent to a difference using sets. The symbol ! can be used in place of the word NOT. To search for documents that contain "peanut butter" but not "jelly time" use the query: "peanut butter" NOT "jelly time" Note: The NOT operator cannot be used with just one term. For example, the following search will return no results: NOT "peanut butter" - The "-" or prohibit operator excludes documents that contain the term after the "-" symbol. To search for documents that contain "peanut butter" but not "jelly time" use the query: "peanut butter" -"jelly time" Grouping MilkandCookies Search supports using parentheses to group clauses to form sub queries. This can be very useful if you want to control the logic for a query. To search for either "monkey" or "banana" and "website" use the query: (monkey OR banana) AND website This eliminates any confusion and makes sure you that website must exist and either term monkey or banana may exist. Jul 6, 2008 7:26 PM Comments: 3
Downtime: June 25, 2008 At around 4:30 pm PST, while configuring the database for performance, I accidentally killed the database. It took a record two hours to recover from it. The good news is that I eventually recovered everything, with no loss of data. See the bottom of this post if you care to know all the technical details. Needless to say, it stressed me the fuck out!! Once I got everything back up and running. I took a break. But after an hour or so, I noticed that the performance tweaks I added were actually sucking up a ton of resources and slowing down the site. I thought, what the hell, the sites been up and down a ton already today, what's a little more downtime while I undo everything and go back to where I was before. Suffice to say, everything is now nice and zippy and solid. Lesson learned. As a little treat, I'll pre-announce here that we are using a brand spanking new search engine for the site. The new search had nothing to do with today's downtime and has actually improved performance dramatically, especially the speed of searches themselves. I haven't officially announced the new search because, so far, it's been pretty much a drop in replacement of the old one. Same interface and features, just way faster and more efficient. But that's only the tip of the iceberg. When I get a chance, over the next several days, I will expose more of the advanced features of the new search in an Advanced Search page. Stay tuned. Brief Technical Details of Today's Downtime Over the last several weekends, I have been working on increasing the performance of MilkandCookies. This was typically done at night, especially on Sunday nights when traffic is low. I noticed that some SQL INSERTS seemed to take a while, so I thought maybe my main tables had grown too big and table level locking was getting in the way. Switch from MyISAM to InnoDB on some tables to get row level locking seemed like a probable solution. Problem is that InnoDB doesn't support FULL TEXT indexing, which is what I have been using for our search feature. I had wanted to use a search application rather than FULL TEXT for a while now, and this seemed the perfect excuse to go for it. I researched and asked around and settled on Lucene. Once up and running I tested it for a few days as an internal beta and early this week quietly rolled it out. The next night I killed FULL TEXT and switched my largest/slowest tables to InnoDB. Everything seemed fine until today when I tried to optimize settings for InnoDB and everything when SNFU. I had followed the advice of several sources, including MySQL Performance Blog. Everything looked in order until I restarted MySQL. It would not come back up, and my InnoDB tables appeared corrupted. Two hours later I discovered the culprit. Amoung other directives, I had changed the innodb_buffer_pool_size variable in my my.cnf file. This turned out to cause the InnoDB log files to become unreadable because they were created at a different size. What confused me is that I thought I had reverted all my changes, but it turns out I had reverted all settings except that one, the only one that was a problem. So I reverted it too, and everything was good again, or so I thought. Even with everything fixed, performance was deteriorating. So I gave up on InnoDB and reverted the tables back to MyISAM. It's not a total loss of effort, everything is back to being fast and stable, and the new search is amazing. And now I know that InnoDB is not the way to go for our needs. Live and learn. Jun 25, 2008 10:04 PM Comments: 4
Load Testing Results: Faster, Better, Stronger After consistent tooling, research and retooling throughout the day, I believe I found a great new configuration for MilkandCookies. Recently we switched to a new web server (Lighttpd) which is leaner and faster than our old friend Apache. Today I took the time, during our regular mid-day load, to tweak and fix a few longstanding performance issues. Fixes included a combination of settings for caching (local and upstream), compression (css, javascript) and configuration (finding the right timeouts, and number of processes to spawn, et al). There is no easy way to do this other that educated guesses along with trial and error. Once I was done, I ran the site through a couple of cache checker pages to be sure all the caching headers worked as expected. Caching, like many other technologies on the web, is a voodoo science due to differences of opinion about which standards are correct. But I hope to have solved problems like having to get the same data twice, even though it hasn't changed, and it's evil twin circumstance, getting the cached page even when it's changed on the server (such as before and after logging in). Let me know if you are experiencing any issues. I hope this results in a zippier feel as you navigate the site, and I thank for your patience today as things were retooled. May 20, 2008 3:35 PM Comments: 3
MilkandCookies and Get Satisfaction We have decided to partner up with Get Satisfaction to help answer questions, fix problems and discuss new features. What is Get Satisfaction? Get Satisfaction is a place where people can get the most from the products they use, and where companies are encouraged to get real with their customers. Questions Answered Ask a question, report a problem, share an idea, or join in conversations already in progress. The most useful replies rise to the top. We’ll notify you via email when people respond. Everyone Is Invited Customers, employees, and companies are all welcome here. Nothing is hidden, and no one is censored. Join the conversation! We are in the process of moving over the FAQ to Get Satisfaction now. Drop on by and bitch about the site, sing it's praises, ask/answer a question, announce a bug or request a feature. If it works out, it will replace our bug tracking, our feedback system and our FAQ. Personal messaging will still exist. Visit MilkandCookies at Get Satisfaction. Apr 23, 2008 6:04 PM Comments: None
April Fools: 100,000 Links! No joke, we just rolled past 99,999 to 100,000 links. Time to bring the site in for service. Oh, and April Fools to all you suckers who still think that the stupid vernal equinox marks the new year. Yeah, whatever! Apr 1, 2008 12:25 AM Comments: 2
State of the Cookie: March 2008 It's been a couple of months since Bryan completed his contract coding for MilkandCookies. It's been as much time since I should have started looking for a day job again. Once I got off my ass and started looking, I experienced some rather disappointing interviews, one of which was 7 hours long meeting with 16 people!!! But I'm happy to say that, after about a week of negotiations, I accepted an offer from The Seattle Times as a Software Engineer, working on their websites. I seriously thought about this job at I Can Has Cheezburger?, but then I saw this statement and was instantly repelled: "using ASP.NET (using C#), SQLServer and IIS." *blech* What does this mean to me? Presents! I bought a PS3. My username is euchrid_ebus. All the good ones were taken, so I used one based on my SecondLife username Euchid Ebus. If you have a Playstation or an SL account, invite me as a friend so we can kill/play together. I am also going to buy an iPhone. No they aren't perfect, and I love my Blackberry; but let's face it, they have the best mobile browser around and that's what I really need to closely monitor the site when I am away from a computer. What does this mean for the site(s). It means that I am going to be contracting out major new features to, well, contractors. I will still be the Senior Architect as well as coding minor features and bugs. I already have a person in mind to take over new features. Stay tuned for more on that. I took down the banner ad toward the top of the page. It was displayed only to Anonymous users as an experiment. No one formally complained about it, and it did well at first. But since then, revenue has leveled off to about what it was before I put it up, maybe a little better. So I see it as a wash, net zero. I am constantly experimenting with revenue streams. We want the best bang with the least annoyance. So far, so good. Those of you who know about the crazy attempts most advertisers make to get their ads into buzz worthy websites know the litany of pitches I regularly reject. ;) My first day at The Times is Monday March 17th. Not only do they know about MilkandCookies, but it's in a large part because of the site that I got hired. So there are no confict of interests. Since our last State of the Cookies, MilkandCookies traffic has shown very little fluctuation. While I would like to say it's been on the rise, I do get alot of confidence from how solid the daily traffic is. "This is a decent and honorable country website -- and resilient, too. We have been through a lot together. We have met challenges and faced dangers, and we know that more lie ahead. Yet we can go forward with confidence -- because the State of our Union Cookie is strong ... our cause in the world on the Net is right ... and tonight that cause goes on." ----- Jaxon Founder, MilkandCookies Mar 7, 2008 2:29 PM Comments: 1
MilkandCookies + Feedburner = MilkandCookies Everywhere MilkandCookies has teamed up with Feedburner to help make our Headlines and Latest Links as ubiquitous as possible. What this means is that our RSS feeds and email syndication is now more stable, more robust and richer than ever before. Access is now available not only for your INBOX, blog and feed reader; but also mobile devices, phones, portal pages like Yahoo and iGoogle, etc. Pretty much anywhere.   From the Is there a MilkandCookies mailing list? FAQ answer: Using Feedburner, we are able to deliver our Headlines and Latest Links straight to your INBOX. This service supports both rich-text plain-text formats. Get MilkandCookies in your mailbox: You do not need to have a MilkandCookies.com account to sign up. Having a MilkandCookies.com account does not automatically register you in this service. They are separate entities. Our previous email service, from Feedblitz is still available, but will no longer be supported: Headlines, Latest Links.   From the Is MilkandCookies syndicated via RSS, XML, ATOM? FAQ answer: Thanks to Feedburner, we support a wide variety of syndication options and formats. Feeds are translated on-the-fly into a format (RSS or Atom) compatible with any reader: on the desktop, web, mobile devices and beyond. Buttons to popular sites are provided as a convenience. If one you want is not listed, simply use the main RSS link. You do not need to have a MilkandCookies.com account to use this feature.  Headlines        Latest Links     Feb 20, 2008 1:55 PM Comments: None
RSS Feed Issues Resolved It's come to our attention that, possibly for months now, the MilkandCookies feeds have had some problems. This problem was exacerbated but the fact that many feed readers parsed our RSS just fine, while others didn't work at all. We looked into it and discovered a couple of simple mistakes that would cause some readers to gack. These issues have been resolved and we added a few extra elements to the feeds to help all feed readers handle our syndication accurately. Our feeds are all formatted with Unicode (UTF-8), if you are still experiencing problems, please be sure that your feed reader supports Unicode, all modern readers do. We appologise for any problems this has caused. And as always, your feedback is greatly appreciated. To see all our feed options, check out the FAQ. Feb 7, 2008 2:59 PM Comments: None
State of Cookie: MilkandCookies Turns Seven and the Year 2007 in Review Happy Birthday MilkandCookies!!! Though many other elements started coming together before this date, January 3rd 2001 was the first post to the site. Seems like an official enough day to start with. Thank you to everyone who has supported the site. I say it all the time, MilkandCookies would not have made it this far without the community that has formed around it. ;) State of the Cookie: 2007 in Review 2007 was a great year for MilkandCookies. I finally quit my day job at Adobe, after ten years in the computer software field (2 1/2 at LizardTech and 7 1/2 at Adobe). January 5th, 2007 was my last day there. Ever since then, I have been dedicated exclusively to MilkandCookies and the MilkandCookies Network. Bryan, who had been contracting for MilkandCookies for a couple of month in his free time, joined us around January 15th as a programmer and a database ETL specialist. Having never programmed in Python before, he picked up on it in a matter of weeks (this is common actually becasue Python is such a great language) and was soon an expert in Django, a database driven, web framework written in Python. Bryan designed the database and it's interaction with the code, while I remained in charge of achitecture, usability, layout and design. We officially rolled out the completely rewritten site June 9th, 2007. This was an important milestone because the old code design was too rigid for the kind of new features we wanted to add. The new code is more abstract, extensible, scalable and most importantly faster. You can read more about it in the original announcement article: New MilkandCookies.com on the Rise. On a sad note, our beloved graphic designer, Laura, decided to further her education in 3D graphic design. She was unable to continue contracting with us due to her increased workload with her day job and night school. Laura is responsible for all the main graphics on MilkandCookies and the majority of the graphics on the Network sites. We love Laura, wish her the best, and look forward to working with her again soon. You can check out some of her work on the Themes page. In the final personnel change of the year, Bryan returned to the "legitimate" job market in the middle of December 2007. Bryan worked hard and enthusiastically all year, putting in more hours that he was paid for on a wage that was far below his talents. We had agreed on a one year commitment, which we fell roughly one month shy of. Bryan had no trouble finding a new job in the field at which he excels, ETL. Bryan is still deeply invested in the site, both as an avid user and our only other full Administrator besides myself. He will continue to work in an advisory role for technical issues as well as being open to contract work when necessary. If we can afford him in the future, we will gladly hire him back. We wish him luck in his career and are grateful for his hard work, his enthusiasm and his inspiration. This leaves me to revert to my role managing all the responsibilities of the site other than those which are currently available to the MilkandCookies community. My plan is to continue to, through changes to the code, give more and more responsibilities over to the users. Many of these responsibilities are currently available to Moderators, and after they have been well tested, will become available to users who have shown a personal interest in the health and vitality of the site through meaningful voting, commenting, submitting and feedback. Stay tuned. We have many plans for 2008. But I am going to reserve commenting on that for a future post. I will add that this year has taught me, among other things, that we can do better advertising. There is a groundswell of traditional advertising making it's way into the web. Google has been great for us, but we have little control over what ads are placed on the site. We are looking for direct partnerships with companies that are "relevant to our interests" rather than the sometimes random feel we sometimes get from the AdSense system. To this end we started contacting companies directly and started publicizing some of our statistics. More on this in our Advertising FAQ. MilkandCookies not an aggressive advertiser. And we often shoot ourselves in the foot by minimizing our efforts to "monitize' the site, instead favoring content and "user experience". If we wanted to devote a section of the site to boobies and "hilarious" injuries, we could really pull in the traffic and thus cash. This is also true if we were to sanitize the site by banning issues controversial to a typical "family" focussed advertiser; issues like nudity, politics, religion, racism, etc. But I don't want to do either of those, I believe the quality of the site, such as it is, would degrade irrevocably. Instead we operate between these extremes. Basically, if I wanted to sell out, I would work at Microsoft. (*shutters*) But to our credit, we have a significant number of very loyal users, all of you reading this, and this is what matters most to me personally. I prefer things to happen organically, but I have started to underastand that a certain amount of PR, self marketing and networking is necessary. Though these are not where my better talents lie, I am forcing myself to learn the ropes. In the mean time, you can help evangelize by posting links to our site and telling your friends about MilkandCookies. The more the merrier. ;) Thank You for Your Support I want to give a special thanks our team of Moderators who volunteer their time working behind the scenes fixing links, editing text, adding tags, monitoring abuse, giving feedback, featuring content, beta testing and bug reporting, among countless other ever increasing responsibilities. I could never do all the work required to manage this site alone. I run most ideas by them before jumping and and their feedback has been invaluable, especially with the rewrite and all the new features. Thank you everyone for keeping MilkandCookies as vibrant and alive as it is, and may the community continue to grow and thrive. Happy Birthday to MilkandCookies and Happy New Year to all of you!!! -- Jaxon    Founder MilkandCookies.com Jan 3, 2008 9:25 AM Comments: 11
New Feature: Link Mirrors In an effort to combat broken links, we set up MilkandCookies.com to be able to hold multiple mirrors for each of our links. A mirror is an alternative location on the web for any of the links on our site. This allows us to immediately fall back to an alternative location when the primary one is no longer valid. To submit a mirror, simply go to the link you have an alternative location for and click Add Mirror. You will be forwarded to a form page where you simply enter in the new location and you're done. In many ways mirrors are processed the same way new links are handled. For instance, mirrors are validated, and checked against our existing links to avoid duplication, and only registered users can submit mirrors. Unlike new links, we already have the title, description and tags, so there is no need to enter that information again. Mirrors do not go live immediately, they are verified by MilkandCookies moderators first. Ad mirrors do not count against the daily total of links you can submit on one day. While there are no points awarded for adding mirrors, we are working on it. When points for mirrors are available, you will get credit retroactively. We simply didn't want to wait any longer to make this feature available. We hope you enjoy this new feature. Feel free to share with us you comments and questions. Nov 22, 2007 10:07 PM Comments: 8
New Feature: Related Links Each of the link pages now displays a couple of links related to the current one. Just another way to explore the 70,000 links in our database, collected over the last seven years. Nov 18, 2007 11:44 PM Comments: 5
The Return of DevilDucky and Friends Back in July 2007, we made an announcement about the death of the MilkandCookies Network. This was all about integrating the five sites we had back into MilkandCookies, the flagship of the sites. "Basically we wanted to make it easy to log in (for those with accounts), move around, interact with links (including submitting, visiting, tracking, voting and commenting) as well as interacting with other members (including messaging, tracking and sharing)." Now that this has been accomplished, and it seems most everyone who cares knows that MilkandCookies is unified, we got to thinking about what we should do with the old domain names. Today we are announcing that all the old sites are back in business. Like before, the operate from sections of the same data set as MilkandCookies, the difference is that they are not designed to work in conjunction with MilkandCookies. The focus of each sites is, in some cases, a little different. PistolWimp contains all the moderator accepted embedded videos from the MilkandCookies database, around 9,000 total. DevilDucky narrows is down by listing only the best of the best of those videos, around 2,000 total. SugarJar lists all the music videos, just like it used to. These sites should be interesting to you if you prefer fewer features, a simpler, uncluttered design, and don't mind there there is no community related infrastructure to facilitate users and user interaction. None of these external sites have profiles, comments, voting, points, hit counters or user icons. In fact there are no logins at all since there are no user accounts. We know that there are many of you who prefer this old school simplicity and, what the hell, it only took us a day to get them back online, so why not?!?! ;) As for RubyTooth, the old game site, it's not up yet but look for it soon. Each of the sites is listed on the front page at the bottom of the sidebar for ease of use. PistolWimp DevilDucky SugarJar Nov 14, 2007 3:39 PM Comments: 6
New Feature: News Page Since MilkandCookies.com started, back in 1999, we typically shied away from current events. We traditionally looked for links that would "stand the test of time" instead of only being relevant for a few weeks or so. Recently, however, there have been too many current event submissions for us to ignore, so we have been accepting them. And these news stories have clearly been embraced by the community at large. However, with the recent increase in the number of daily submissions on MilkandCookies.com, the Latest Links page has been inundated. So we decided to create a new page dedicated specifically to current events, a News section. There is a link in the top left corner of very page marked News, or follow this link: http://www.milkandcookies.com/news/ News items can still become Headlines and they still appear in the archives. So what's different? Unlike every other link on the site, items posted in this new News area are not listed in the Latest Links area. This is what makes News links fundamentally unique. Posting to MilkandCookies.com doesn't change. You don't need to mark your submissions to indicate whether they are current events, our Moderators will handle that. Let us know if you have any questions. We hope you like this new feature. Nov 9, 2007 12:15 AM Comments: None
New Feature: Public Playlists MilkandCookies is happy to announce that users can now make their playlists available to all other visitors to the site by publishing them. In addition, playlists can be automatically numbered in either ascending or descending order, allowing for numbered ordered lists and Top 10 style countdown lists. Public Playlists start as User Playlists, using the same mechanisms currently available. The difference is that they can be "Published". Once Published they are no longer editable. They go to a limbo area waiting to be approved or rejected. If rejected, the simply return to your User Playlist area. If approved, they can be seen by other people, voted and commented on. Published Playlists can also be headlined, if voted high enough. There are two ways a Published Playlist can be edited. You can either request a change, like you can request a change to a link now. Or the Playlist can be returned to you as a Private Playlist, but all votes and comments are lost. You can see the list of current Public Playlists by clicking the Playlists link in the sidebar menu. Sep 14, 2007 3:49 AM Comments: 4
Video Playback Issues Resolved We were experiencing some issues with video playback where the player would appear, but no video would show. Refreshing the page would sometimes fix it. We were able to determine the problem and fix it. Please let us know if you still experience this or any other issues. Jul 20, 2007 1:24 PM Comments: 2

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