Servusamanu.com

I’ve been tweaking the website all day. Right now I’m using Yslow to optimize the site.

I got a C grade overall.

Time to use gzip and add expires headers.

This article ‘Five Ways to Speed Up Page Response Times‘ has been very helpful.

Cheers!

Aside from hobby writing, I do some freelance web design. I recently made a page with Creekside Systems for MastrolePassing.com. Mastrole Passing provides football training camps for quarterbacks and receivers based out of Florida. Take a look!

Rant

I spent the last few days working with a web template for a freelance web job. I might as well have not bothered.

There is nothing quite as frustrating as using a template, the intention being to make life easier, and spending twice as much time flogging it to death trying to get it to work than I would have if I had just coded from scratch to start with. The web designer purists out there are probably chuckling to themselves considering this a lesson learned: code it yourself, code it yourself!. To that I say phooey!

Instead, the lesson here is I need to run my templates through an extensive interview process. Dig a little into their background and life experience. Did they have a rough childhood that’s going to leave me bewildered and confused as unpredictable problems arise? Do they suffer from a lack of formal education, which forces me to go back and comment another person’s code to figure out what’s going on. Or worst of all, is their resume a novel script, the template being nothing but some fancy images that look nice, but the functionality being vapor. The lesson is I might just need to join the world of template maker’s and make some that give you some direction on how to use them.

/Rant

Another technical update:

As you can see, I’ve removed the background. The other one was a bit cluttered and distracting. I also changed the front back to black, Sylfaen. I just think it looks better. I took the background away from the footer box and centered the copyright lines. The top header also got padding change.

I tested the wordpress+Ajax plugin. Interesting, maybe worth looking at in the future, but it had some issues, so I disabled it.

The forums are still a test-bed only, but permalinks are now working. I’ve been trying out a few different styles. The current one is inove, found here. http://ericlbarnes.com/projects/inove-for-bbpress/. I like the look of it.

I think that’s about it. Forum is still a work in progress, but I’m pleased with this latest round of updates.

~Robert