Behind AnandTech - 2001 Server Upgrade

AnandTech Today

AnandTech went through a few different look-and-feel routines, and finally concluded with what you see today. Today's AnandTech is completely dynamic. Documents, news, polls, etc. are all published using an Administration system. To keep speed to a maximum, caching routines are used for most of the main queries. What this does is allow the system to run a query, such as the latest web news, and store the query in server memory for a specified amount of time. Thereby permitting the system to retrieve the data from memory when the page is read, and precludes ColdFusion from contacting the database server. Searching AnandTech is accomplished by using the Microsoft Full Text search engine built into SQL Server. Collections are created on the tables that require searching, and the system runs ColdFusion queries against these collections. The majority of the site is held in Include files (i.e. the top, bottom, left, and right parts of the page). This allows new look-and-feel changes to be done with ease, since only the outside templates need to be modified. Because the actual content for the web site is stored in the database, it makes changing fonts, logos, site design a fairly easy task.

AnandTech Administration

This is the heart of the AnandTech website where content is published and reports are generated. The Administration area is built solely for Internet Explorer, due to some of the scripting used and advanced controls. There are numerous modules in the administration area that allow each area of the site to be administrated. When an author logs in to the Administration area, they are presented with the "engines" that they are permitted to use. The system administrator sets to which engines that each user has access.

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Documents are published using a document engine. This engine allows the author to add a document of any number of pages by using simple HTML forms. Documents can be updated and deleted, or pages added or removed from them through this engine. When documents are read from the site, the number of times each page was read is stored, so that the document authors can see how well their document was viewed. AnandTech's Web News authors use a similar engine to add news to the site; only they have a WYSIWIG editor to post their news. This allows the news post to be written in HTML, and viewed in HTML as the author posts their news. This editor is very similar to some of the thick-client WYSIWIG editors, like Microsoft FrontPage.