Tweaks and Tidbits

Dec 17, 2020, 04:26 AM

The site is using a custom build of Nginx which enables TLS 1.3. We're more secure and (yet again) faster. TLS 1.2 support remains for legacy browsers.

MariaDB has been optimized for the site, increasing performance. Some of my custom code on Home and Links has been optimized to provide lower overhead for SQL queries as well.

Minor tweaks in other places: Forum logons stay logged on for all pages, favicons look better at higher resolution, buttons on Links pages have been redesigned, Gallery header is cached locally to prevent delayed loading, login panel in header improved focus / display...

Updates and Optimizations

Jun 23, 2020, 07:46 PM

Updated to PHP 7.4... more speed.

Also optimized SSL configuration to ensure only modern security schemes are allowed. No TLS v1.3, though... my OS build doesn't fully support a recent enough version of OpenSSL.

The "pretty urls" were dropped from Links, Gallery, and Forum. No one really sees URLs anymore, and it was just another action slowing down the site.

Since the previous update, I also moved to Brotli compression over gzip (gzip still supported where needed). It was another little performance boost.

New Web Host

Aug 17, 2019, 02:41 PM

Just completed migration to Hostinger for web hosting. Chose them for low cost and extreme flexibility on their VPS platform. I am now running Nginx as the server and PHP 7.3 for processing.

Web site should now be faster than ever and also very secure.