Iconification, Design, and Weather
Jun 4, 2024, 1:54 pm
I've added the Font Awesome library to the site. This enables better icons throughout. New icons for logon, lock, news categories, settings, location, and icons on the menu buttons. This change also solves the issue where browsers may convert some symbols into emoticons. The menu received a redesign with the icon addition.
The weather system has received updates...
New graphing options: toggle between rain percentage and amount, wind speed and gusts, and humidity and dew point. The wind speed graph always shows speed and gusts, with one represented by a dotted line.
Enhanced radar: added image time using OCR on the browser to parse the radar time (10 images take about 1.5 seconds to parse), better cache-busting and sequence order assurance (using animated GIF loop and extracting the frames), speed control for animation, pause with hover over dots to switch images, pinch to zoom on touch screen devices, double-click and mouse drag to zoom with a mouse, cropped image for a cleaner look.
New loading code: optimized load efficiency for faster load, removed duplicate radar image load (originally to improve performance, but no longer needed).
Getting Just A Bit More
Jan 9, 2024, 1:56 am
In my quest for performance... These are the top enhancements I've made recently:
1. New server: my host has KVM servers at a lower price than OpenVZ (what I had). In addition to saving money, I have increased memory, more storage, and a dedicated kernel (Open VZ shares kernels). More memory means better caching configurations, which equals faster sites.
2. Brotli with Cloudflare: I had used Brotli (better compression) on my site in the past. Once I moved to Cloudflare as a proxy, they only accepted gzip inbound (though they sent Brotli). Last year they added Brotli passthrough support. Now enabled here, it eliminates half of the compression steps before pages are delivered.
3. Redis usage increase: I changed default PHP sessions from files to Redis, reducing latency for some pages.
4. New weather data source: I moved to Open-Meteo. The data files are over 80% smaller, for faster loading of the weather forecast.
Researching these improvements, many ask "Why" if only to save a few milliseconds...
Small changes today are the building blocks for great achievement in the future.
News Enhancements
Aug 30, 2023, 12:10 am
The News System had a significant rewrite on the backend. It looks identical. The technical change was a shift from using PHP to craft an individualized page to having it send a news dump. By reducing the complexity of the PHP code, the page is created faster. Javascript replaces the PHP for drawing the News section. The weather section starts loading sooner. Total page load is about 0.2 seconds faster. May not seem like much: it's 30% faster.
This was the last cookie code on the site. Removing cookies reduces traffic to the server and eliminates a legacy technology. The database schema was flattened as there is no need for the linked tables; reducing load and increasing performance. Feed selection and searching is now processed locally. These features do not talk to the server, making the actions nearly instant. There's a cost for this, but it is minor.
The full news feed creates a larger initial page load. The total page load is 90 KB larger. On a 100 mb/s internet connection, that adds less than 0.01 seconds.
