eZ Flow Front Page, the iPad, the Multimedia MerryGoRound
eZ Flow calls it a Multimedia Carousel. It is quite a nice feature, when viewed from a computer.
Today, it caused real problems for the iPad.
The Setup
To show how beautiful content, including ads that people actually want to see, may be served over an intranet I was setting up a local openx adserver to eZ Flow demo.
The requirement was for an intranet that could travel in a briefcase, so used a macbook pro and an iPad.
- "Create Network" from the wifi menu on the Macbook pro
- Named it "mbp"
- On iPad, look for "mbp" in the list of local wifi
- Boom, iPad connected to Macbook Pro
And everything "just worked" exactly as pitched and designed, except for one huge problem. Every time the iPad user (viewer is a better term than user for new media) goes back to Home in eZ Flow, Safari stalls for a minute or two. Atomic browser same deal, a long hard stall. Every single time. Makes for an unusable demo to say the least.
In this case "Home" is simply the default demo page from an eZ Flow install. The only change made was to serve the two banner ads on the Home page from a local openx adserver installed on the Macbook Pro. This intranet has purposefully no internet access from either machine.
Since the ad serving mechanism was the only change, I figured that was the source of the problem. Long story (almost all day) short, it appears to be a javascript problem. But not as first suspected, with the openx javascript. The problem is with the javascript that pulls the front page out of the cache when the multimedia carousel is a component of the page.
The very first load of the "Home" page loads fast and furious, but don't be fooled. Subsequent page loads coming from the cache will crawl.
eZ Publish and openX are two great open source efforts that work great together. Just watch out for that eZ Flow Multimedia Carousel when an iPad is involved.
BTW, I think they underestimated battery life on the iPad. Those things are truly amazing in terms of lack of power consumption. Go green.
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