My friend Karen has just created the world’s smallest Digg logo at ~2 microns.

“The microscope is a dual-beam focused ion beam/scanning electron microscope. So I milled the word using the beam of gallium ions, but the pictures are all taken with the electron beam. The sample was tilted a bit so that you can see that the words are actually milled into the material.”

Very cool -
Kevin

Recently at Digg we started doing internationalisation efforts. Our database was storing data in latin1 character set although PHP was using the UTF8 character set. That limited our language support, so we decided to convert the DB to UTF8.

MySQL has a “charset=” option at the end of the CREATE TABLE, so we ran through all our tables doing “alter table charset=utf8.” This worked, and we were pleased as punch.

But then examining a particular table, I noticed:

CREATE TABLE (
id integer not null default 0,
name varchar(32) character set latin1 default NULL,
…
) charset=utf8;

Every column that actually stored text specified the old “latin1″ encoding. It turns out in MySQL, when it comes time to change your character set, there’s a special ALTER command that will also change each of the columns:

alter table convert to character set utf8;

This changes all the text columns to the new character set as well.

Digg on,
–
timeless

Hi all,

Just wanted to give everyone a heads up and some insight into some of the behind-the-scenes changes we have been making. One of the things we are constantly tweaking is the story promotion algorithm – it’s something that we have been adjusting on a regular basis for quite some time.  Most of our additions/tweaks go unnoticed, others take a few days to get right as we watch them run in the wild (on the live site).  Last week we introduced a new factor into the algorithm and monitored the results. After analyzing the data, we made adjustments this weekend to allow it to perform optimally.  You’ll notice these changes on the live site today (no more stories sitting in the queue w/100+ Diggs).

Digg on,

Kevin