News Enhancements

[brian]

The News System had a significant rewrite on the backend. It looks identical. The technical change was a shift from using PHP to craft an individualized page to having it send a news dump. By reducing the complexity of the PHP code, the page is created faster. Javascript replaces the PHP for drawing the News section. The weather section starts loading sooner. Total page load is about 0.2 seconds faster. May not seem like much: it's 30% faster.
 
This was the last cookie code on the site. Removing cookies reduces traffic to the server and eliminates a legacy technology. The database schema was flattened as there is no need for the linked tables; reducing load and increasing performance. Feed selection and searching is now processed locally. These features do not talk to the server, making the actions nearly instant. There's a cost for this, but it is minor.

The full news feed creates a larger initial page load. The total page load is 90 KB larger. On a 100 mb/s internet connection, that adds less than 0.01 seconds.