Hidden away in the Google help screens is something that gives Google+ users an extra reason to be happy!

The amount of free storage for Picasa Web Albums is 1GB. However, this doesn’t include certain photo sizes. For non-Google+ users this is anything up to 800 x 800 pixels. For Google+ users this is a much better 2048 x 2048.

For videos there are no changes for Google+ users – any videos less than 15 minutes long don’t count towards your limit.

If you get to your 1GB limit then anything you upload will automatically be resized to fit within the limitations of the free storage.

I know there’s been a lack of content recently. However, this is due to a number of factors…

1. I’m very busy on version 2 of my YouTube Embed plugin – a huge change and my most complex plugin yet – this is taking a big chunk of my time.
2. I’m using the excellent new Google Page Speed Online to look at various improvements to site speed. I’ve also been, and will continue to, making changes to this site.
3. Spent far too much time trying to sort out a technical issue with Streamline. It’s still not resolved and I’m sure, at the rate they’re going, a rant post is imminent.
4. I get a lot of this work done at home in the evening. However, I’m looking at moving house so apart from traipsing around various properties, I’m also getting lots of DIY done as well.

I’m also expending a bit of time preparing for my birthday in a couple of weeks time. It’s a, erm, “special” birthday and I’ve asked for money or Amazon gift vouchers – I’ll then be the proud owner of a Playstation 3! I should add that all the preparation is deciding what games and accessories to buy

However, I do have a couple of articles to publish so, when I find time, I’ll try and get those completed.

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