In my quest for performance... These are the top enhancements I've made recently:…

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…

I've created a dedicated weather page. The original weather widget that I built was constrained to fit in the space I allocated on my homepage. By having a dedicated page, I have more options for what to display and how to display it…

Redis is an in-memory data structure store, used as a distributed, in-memory key–value database, cache and message broker, with optional durability. What does it mean? By using Redis to hold dynamic values in memory that are typically held in a database or file, the website can access those values faster. Faster access means faster web page delivery…

News settings were not sticking very long. Cookies set by JavaScript only stay for a week on Safari. The news feed query is done server side and embedded into the home page. These settings need to be cookies…

The News system has been updated. Faster and more consistent display…

The weather code was expanded to include current conditions, alerts, hourly definition in daily graphs, real feel, precipitation, wind, snow, clouds, humidity, visibility, pressure, and solar graphs. Changed the icons to a weather icon font. Added loading indicator when changing locations. Added buttons to jump through the forecast one day at a time. Significant performance enhancements: Graph loading time was reduced by over 10 times. Graphing library was customized to include only necessary functions (85% reduction)…

The Weather Code has changed. With Apple's acquisition of DarkSky, the feed was going to go dark soon... It took me a while to find a replacement. VisualCrossing is filling the gap. Their weather magnet is sleek, modern, and open source…

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…

Updated to PHP 7.4... more speed…