Tagged Performance

Updated to PHP 7.4... more speed…

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…

Moved the site server engine to nginx. Significantly improves page delivery. Replaced all jQuery code on the Home page with vanilla JavaScript. This removed the jQuery library, adding yet another performance enhancement (both load and execution)…

Moving towards better optimization, the number of background images on the site are being reduced. To keep form and function to point, this is being done by flattening the overall look. Many images have had minor adjustments to fit the updated style. Check the About page (link on the bottom of the page) to see how the site look has changed over the past years…

The weather system has easy access to view the forecast throughout the day. Check out the forecast tabs. In addition, there have been minor tweaks and adjustments throughout the weather system. Hourly forecasts now display 24 hours into the future (it was 12 hours). ZoneCast now displays daytime and nighttime forecasts for the next seven days. It was formerly daytime only for 7 days or daytime and nighttime for 3 days. Fixes for formatting issues and optimizing display items to get the most out of the weather system…

The News system has received a speed boost. Instead of loading the news every time you visit the page, it loads it on the server in the background. This trims off a few seconds to load the web page. News updates occur every five minutes... the news will never be old…

Fixed the Captcha on the Gallery for public comments (it wasn't working before). Links Settings page no longer needs to reload when a setting is changed. Changes apply instantly without reloading the page. There is a new option to use AJAX for the details popups as well. The Forum, Gallery, and Links now generate Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs. Weather code has been optimized and loads faster. The weather module also remembers which day you were viewing when it auto updates. News system auto updates are faster and most of the processing happens with no noticeable impact…

The news system has received another round of updates. What you'll see: new smaller loading indicator, cleaner display that shows more articles (alternating row shading & rows slightly closer together), enhanced article parsing to reduce wasted screen space, articles selected by clicking in row (not just article title), background highlighting for article selection, article time display goes back 24 hours in headline list, time display in article (xx minutes ago) now calculated when browser loads (not when feed loads), better use of accent colors. What you won't see: simplified…

This update completes the most critical pieces of the new news system. Your settings are now saved. Any options configurable in the news system will be saved in cookies on your computer. Category filtering now re-queries the database to return as many matching articles within your limit as possible. For example, if you want to view 25 articles only from World. The new system will query the top 25 World articles. The old one would have only displayed the World articles out of the top 25 of all articles (maybe 2 or 3)…

With a bit of "blood, sweat, and tears" ;D I have re-written much of the weather code. I gutted what I wasn't using and optimized what I was. You should notice quite a difference in performance. CSS in place of a nested IFRAME fixed part of the problem. Then there was the cache cleaning code that did nothing. I'm sure I could do more. Perhaps another day...