Very Early Beta of GOAD Works

GOAD (Grassroots Online Activist/m Database), aka "The Network", to a large degree works. You could add, edit, search, and browse - and it will generally work. This makes me *extremely* happy!!!

At first I thought I had a serious slowness issue on my hands (it took 30 seconds to add a person), but now I suspect that the problem isn't so bad and that my webhosting company was partially to blame (the server was running slow). Now the server is doing better and you can add a person in 5 seconds with GOAD. Editing a person takes the same amount of time. By contrast you can add/edit a person in approximately 1 second if you do it directly on campusactivism.org. Browsing is much less of a problem as that only takes 1 second with GOAD.

I might be able to improve efficiency by caching some things (like a database of issues, schools, categories and other things that don't change much). I might also try moving from having as many as 10-20 web services (when you edit an object like person), to just having 1 larger web service.

Otherwise, I'm hoping that a five second delay for adding/editing things won't bother people too much. Most of the time people are searching and displaying information - which will go faster. Display a person should take 2.5 seconds, and displaying a table of anything (or sorting the said table) will take about 1 second. I like having things only take 1 second =)

On the other hand, I've been testing it between two computers both located at the same web host and thus presumably on the same local area network. When I start testing it across 2000 miles of internet, it could be slower (and then the benefits of reducing the number of web services might be greater). As silly as it might be, I might end up encouraging people to host their websites with the same hosting company - so we could get much faster ping times (or even on the same machine - might need to rent a dedicated server).

I'm working on networking with people and organizations because in the next two months I'd like to see several websites starting to use this system. Hopefully United for Peace and Justice (and other national organizations) will encourage their member groups to use it.