So, want XML/RSS instead of HTML? A number of URLs you can now attach content_type=rss to the URL and you will get XML/RSS instead of HTML. This does not work for index.pl, comments.pl and article.pl. In the future? Maybe, but for the moment no. If a slash site has an open submission bin (which slashdot does not) you can always keep track of the submissions via RSS by doing this:
http://site.com/submit.pl?op=list&content_type=rss
Long term we will probably add more formats. Its mainly a feature of extending the Slash::XML library.
Now, just to get search back online....

So, to make navigation a bit easier I added the username and my methods. For those of a technical bent, when you do a /~username/ or a /my/ you are not actually peaking into directories, instead I wrote a handler to direct you to the correct URL. Its neat and its something only perl and C can do inside of Apache.
So what are the different things you can do?

• ~username/ takes you to the user's info page
• ~username/journal/ takes you to someone's journal.
• ~username/discussions/ takes you to a list of discussions the users have created (do you know how many people don't get that they can create their own trolltalk via this??? Heck, I even added a form for creating discussions

In addition I added a feature called /my/ (you can also do just a /~/). This allows you to get at a lot of your own information. Here are a few you can do:

• /my/ this will get to your user information
• /my/discussions/ takes you to where you discussions are
• /my/journal/ takes you to where you can manage your own discussions
• /my/inbox/ takes you to any messages you have waiting. You can also use the word "messages" for inbox.

Over time we will probably add more (especially as we bring more features online). There are now quite a few hooks in the code that we have yet to exploit.
For my next trick perhaps I will document all of the places in the code you can have it spit XML instead of HTML out at you :)

So, lets look at all of our new features:
1) Fulltext -working fine
2) Innodb -working fine
3) Perl -no problems
4) Apache -works fine
5) Hardware -sucks rocks
So, back on a different DB box with replication running for backup. Lets see how long this lasts.

You can blame me for all of the /my/ and /~username/ stuff. Plus the Violent Femmes quote.
This is 18 months in the making.
-Brian