Draft version of the new site design

Since the beginning of the year I’ve been working on a revised version of the site. More than just a theme change, this has been a review at every site component. I’m now nearing the end of this work and will launch the new site design soon. However, I thought I’d take the opportunity to provide details of some of the things that have changed – bear in mind that I have a list of 70 changes that I made (many of them individually wide ranging) and 17 things that I didn’t.

Theme

First up is the theme. It’s darker and much more professional. Images have been reduced to save bandwidth (yours and mine!) and new fonts are used. A new “social bar” in the sidebar provides quick access to the sites Twitter and RSS feeds along with the PayPal donation option.

I’ve also implemented “margin reduction”. The site uses a new width, designed to fit perfectly horizontally on screens with a resolution of 1024 pixels or higher. This is in combination with a reduction in blank margins, fitting more information on the screen.

A new drop-down menu has been introduced, including quick access to blog categories and the most popular WordPress plugin pages.

Oh, and XHTML validation has been fixed

A screenshot can be found to the right of the new design – this isn’t the final

Performance

Performance changes have been critical. The site now has a YSlow A Rating (that made me very happy!) with improved caching and compression. I also copy external scripts (e.g. those provided by Google, Twitter and Facebook) to my own server, so they can be compressed and delivered quicker. Numerous plugins were removed after investigation into what was hogging resources the most.

A bizarre change, but bandwidth has been reduced by changing the 404 error page. Originally showing a large image, this now contains an embedded YouTube video. The 404 page is visited every time an invalid page is visited, so a reduction in this page size can make big savings.

Plugins

For those of you who are interested in my WordPress plugin work, 2 big changes have been made.

First up, I’m now using Mantis Bug Tracker to record bugs and enhancements. As part of this I’ve written some code to integrate the results of this directly into the plugin pages on the site – at the bottom of each it will list any bugs or enhancements for that plugin.

Secondly, I’ve added a forum for plugin discussion. Using comments tended to get a bit crowded after a while so comments on plugin pages are now closed (but viewable for historic reasons!) – instead there’s now a link to the forum.

Comments

Speaking of comments – the commenting system has been much improved with a better layout (for those WordPress geeks, I’m now using the automated comment features that WordPress offers, rather than the manual method that was implemented before).

I also now show how many comments are awaiting approval.

Reviews

Any reviews on the site included hidden Google “microcode” – information that Google can pick up and integrate into search results. This was present before but how now been improved.

Anything Else?

Tonnes more, but I’m now going to list them all – when the new site designed launches, I’m sure you’ll find them

For a while I’ve been wanting to improve the bug (and enhancements) tracking for my WordPress plugins. Right now I rely noting down my ideas and any suggestions that people have made and looking at that whenever I’m working on a plugin.

Now, though, I’ve installed MantisBT – a free PHP based bug tracking system. I’ve installed it on domain, configured it up and I’m in the process of adding content – my Simple Social Bookmarks is the guinea pig.

Anyone can view it, but I wanted tighter integration with this site. Plugins exist to do this but they rely on using a SOAP interface – my host doesn’t have this installed, so I can’t use it. Instead I’ve written my own code that directly accesses the MySQL database – and very well it works too. On the bottom of the plugin pages on this site are two new sections – Known Bugs and Planned Enhancements. Under each are listed any entries from the MantisBT database relevant to that category, as well as a link to the roadmap.

Before you go looking for this, it isn’t yet visible, as it’s part of the site revamp that I’m working on.

Right now, I don’t intend to release this as a plugin, but if there’s enough interest I may do.

I’d forgotten, but I made some resolutions last year with regard to 2010. Normally I don’t do any kind of New Years resolution so the giddiness of the event must have got to me. None-the-less, it’s a good reminder to me of why I don’t.

1. Less personal rants, unless it’s about customer service.

I think I got the first part right, but didn’t balance it out so much with the latter. I only posted 16 times about customer service issues last year – and this included about knitted characters and my mums bed. I’d like to think this will improve, but I have to admit that a company either has to get my admiration to disdain to give me good reason to post, and that’s a rarity.

2. More Android

Yep, I got my Android phone, so posts on the subject went up early, and then sloped off as within months, nay, weeks, better and faster versions were released. Even now I can’t post about Angry Birds as my lowly Hero doesn’t have enough memory to support it.

My planned app development never went anywhere either. But, you never know!¹

3. More WordPress Plugins

Well, I think I kept this one. And rather than a number of plugins aimed at a minority I went for the big guns – WP Readme Parser being my particular favourite.

4. Updating the Online Tools

<titter> Never touched them.

I have lots of ideas for the stylesheet compressor, but the work would be huge for a utility tucked away on my site. I have dabbled with the idea of spinning it off to its own site, but that thought hasn’t gone further than rattling around my head, as yet.

5. Arsing around with this blog’s layout

Yep, did that. A little. It’s been small scale stuff here and there. Certainly my planned changes for this year will be much more expansive.

1. actually I do, my workplace are pushing me to put my head in a book and learn VB.NET from scratch to a professional level this year, so Java may have to wait [↩]