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

I’ve had a recent need to edit a downloaded Flash video (.FLV extension). However, my usual editor of choice, PowerDirector, wouldn’t import a file in this format. And, it would appear, editing choices for Flash videos are few and far between.

First of, I used the online video editor, JayCut. It imported and converted the video. However, it had two problems – first, if it’s a large video you have to preview it first before you can edit it. Second, the conversion process had put the video and audio out of sync. I therefore abandoned using JayCut.

Next, I came across an Adobe Air application named RichFLV. Installation is quick and easy. Unfortunately, when importing the video it hung on “99% analysed”. It was still consuming CPU cycles, so I left it. Over 2 hours later, I gave up. Looking at comments on the applications website it would appear that others have had this issue.

Lastly, I came to Moyea FLV Editor Lite, a downloadable application. Because it’s the free version it’s restricted but for the use I wanted to put it to, it was fine. It installed easily and worked quickly. There’s an option to output as a Flash video or Shockwave – the latter gives you the HTML code to embed the result into a website.

I’d loved to have hosted it myself, but I use a fair proportion of my available bandwidth just hosting this site each month as it is – I’m always on the lookout for cheap web hosting, that will give me all the benefits I have plus more. Anyway, as I don’t wish to use my own bandwidth I simply saved it as a flash video and uploaded the file to YouTube – again a conversion took place, but the result is excellent.

I’ve recently become the proud owner of a Nintendo DS – it used to belong to my older daughter and has seen better days. In particular, the hinge was broken. It was also quite mucky (under the plastic, so not easily cleaned) and had various chips and scratches. Oh, and the battery compartment was missing.

To have sent it away to Nintendo and had the hinge fixed would have cost at least £30, so I decided to investigate alternatives. And on eBay I found a UK seller who supplies completely new replacement cases, along with installation instructions. All of this is for the princely sum of £13.99. Oh, and I also had to buy a “Nintendo” screwdriver to get out the pesky “Y” screws. None-the-less, it was far cheaper than a repair, and would resolve the grubbiness and missing parts issue as well.

It arrived last week and it was immediately obvious that this isn’t a genuine Nintendo part, as the case is obviously not the same. The original is white plastic with a thick transparent layer on top. The new was simply a glossy white plastic. It also didn’t seem to be of the same high quality. The installation instructions were also rubbish – thankfully I found a 3 part video on YouTube on how to swap over the cases.

So, at the weekend I sat down to follow the videos. I’d like to say it was easy and went well, but sadly it didn’t. Here’s what I found…

1. The new case comes with its own screws (and none of them Y shaped screws). Sadly, nothing says which screws are for what and the plastic posts they screw into aren’t particular good quality – I would often find that none of the supplied screws would easily work, so I had to use some brute force to get them to “bite”.
2. One of the screen screws on the original case wouldn’t move and I had to break the case apart to get into it
3. The shoulder buttons are a test of patience, which I very nearly failed. They are a nightmare to put back, involving metal posts and springs.
4. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get the power switch to drop into place when fitting the new case together. In the end, I put the switch from the old case in and it worked first time.
5. The new Start and Select buttons are awful – you really have to push them down with your nail to get them to respond.

But here are the two big problems…

1. The final fit and finish leaves a lot to be desired. In particular, the part of the case in front of the bottom screen doesn’t have anything to hold it together and therefore “gapes” quite considerably. I ended up using Super Glue to hold it together.
2. The 3 part video on YouTube suddenly ended stating to continue to part 4. Sadly, no part 4 has been added, so it leaves you at the tricky stage of adding the shoulder buttons. Thankfully, I managed to find another video that completed the instructions. However, for a while I was panicking!

At the end of it, I’m not sure if it was worthwhile. £30 would have got me a guaranteed repair – a mucky case, but I could have got a replacement battery compartment. Instead, I’ve spend £16.49 (including the screwdriver) and have a clean, usable DS now, but sadly of much poorer quality build.