Posting Improvements

Those of you who post around here should notice that it’s a lot faster now.

Previously, whenever a new post or reply was created, the weblog would email me a zip file containing all the posts ever made on my site.  (Yes, I am a backup fanatic.)  There are now nearly 800 posts though, and all those posts total about 1 megabyte, and emailing a 1-megabyte file is taking my server about 15-20 seconds.

So now, the weblog will only send that big email once per day.  If you’re the lucky first poster of the day, then you’ll still feel the slowdown between clicking the "post" button and your post appearing.  But all other posts/replies will be ~instant now.

I also cleaned up the help page so it’s now Easier Than Ever(TM) to include links and other formatting in your posts.