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Monday, June 1, 2009

Ladies and gentlemen... start your engines!

12:00 AM / Web / 7 Comments

Please remain calm. There is no need to panic or adjust the vertical hold on your television set. I've properly launched the new site layout - Land of Whimsy version 2 (or version 11, if you're counting back to the old Whiggles.com/.tk/.da.ru days). Starting a new Movable Type install and database from scratch has meant that previous posts and comments couldn't be converted over to the new design without a lot of unnecessary effort, so this is very much a fresh start. Don't panic, though - all the old content has been maintained for archival purposes. Simply head over to the News Archive Index and scroll down to "Movable Type 3.x (2006-2009) Archives" to find links to all the old content, accessible either by month or by year. I have, however, locked the old entries, meaning that new comments are no longer accepted. If there's something pressing you want to say that pertains to an old entry, simply post it in the new blog with a clear indication as to which entry you're referring.

In terms of functionality, the new design isn't a whole lot different from the previous one, although in my opinion it looks spiffier and is a little more efficient under the hood to boot. The big change, apart from the obviously new graphics, is that the layout is now handled entirely through CSS rather than resorting to positioning everything via tables. CSS layout is certainly harder to write, at least from this neophyte's standpoint, but has the clear benefits of reducing code bloating and making redesigns or even subtle tweaks a heck of a lot easier to implement. For example, only a couple of days ago I came up with a way of cutting the entire site's load time by half and reducing the amount of system resources it consumed simply by altering a couple of lines in the master CSS file. With the previous design, I'd probably have had to go through every page and do it by hand... and I probably wouldn't have bothered, frankly, because it would simply have been easier to leave the site as a heaving, bloated Bessie than to go through all that tedious button-crunching.

Barring the fact that the root URL has changed from whiggles.landofwhimsy.com to www.landofwhimsy.com, everything should be more or less in the same place as before. In any event, I've set up many of the old URLs - particularly the more popular ones, like the HD Image Quality Rankings page - to automatically redirect to the new ones. If you reach a dead end, though, a good rule of thumb is simply to replace the "whiggles" at the beginning of the URL with "www" and see where it leads you. I'd make this automatic, but for the fact that certain archived content (such as news posts, cartoon reviews and the various pages in the Fake Whimsy section) still resides in the "whiggles" subdomain.

A handful of new features for your viewing pleasure:

• Each page now has a "site map" just under the heading, providing a clear indication of where precisely you are at any given time, as well as convenient links back to the page's "parent".
   
• You can now keep up with the latest banter thanks to the "recent comments" section on the right-hand pane of the main page (just under "recent posts").
   
• The Movies section now contains a master list of all movies watched, sans any non-essential comments and information.
   
• The BD & DVD section has been completely retooled and is now laid out far more efficiently, thanks to the use of custom fields (more on those in a minute). I've also implemented pagination (more on that in a minute too) for this section's yearly archives, which prevents pages sizes from getting too unwieldy.
   
• I've weeded out the Links section a little, cutting down on the sites I no longer visit regularly.

A word or two on categories: With the previous design, my use of the pesky things got a little out of hand. Often, a single post could have five categories or more associated with it, meaning that the same post would be duplicated in five different category archives, as well as the relevant monthly archive and individual entry page. Not particularly efficient, as I'm sure you'll agree, and, as the site grew, the sheer number of pages it was required to maintain and update ended up seriously bogging down performance. Therefore, as of now, I'll be disciplining myself, restricting each post to one or at the very most two categories. In addition to improving site performance, this should also hopefully result in things being more organised.

You've probably also noticed that the monthly and category archive pages now feature post summaries instead of full entries. Again, this is an attempt on my part to reduce clutter and improve site performance. In the case of the latter, you may not see a great deal of difference at your end, but it should improve things significantly on the admin side. The more data there is to rebuild whenever a change is made (e.g. posting a new entry, editing an existing one, adding a comment), the longer it takes. For example, say someone posts a comment to an entry from June 1st. Well, when that happens, the archive pages for June, and any categories archives in which the post appears, need to be rebuilt completely, simply to reflect the footer at the bottom of that entry changing rom "0 comments" to "1 comment". If the category and archive pages contain a large number of posts (as the ones for the previous layout do), that can take a considerable amount of time. And people wonder why the site could get slow when posting comments! Using post summaries instead of duplicating the entire post multiple times simply means there's less data for the site to crunch through, reducing bandwidth and speeding things up across the board. Of course, the posts are still saved in their entirety on their own individual entryp ages. Furthermore, to hopefully squeeze a little more performance out of the site, I'd enabled a publishing queue. Now, instead of being updated every single time a new entry is posted, the monthly and category archives are placed in a queue which executes every half-hour (at 5 and 35 minutes past the hour). Therefore, a new entry won't instantaneously appear in the relevant archive, giving the server less to do at any given time.

Finally, it's worth taking a moment to shout out to the creators of the following two Movable Type plugins, both of which went a long way towards helping me achieve aims for this redesign:

• Paged Archives: Alden Bates' plugin allows me to paginate my category and monthly archives to keep the general size of each page from getting too unwieldy.
   
• Custom Fields: Although, as of Movable Type version 4, this plugin has actually been integrated into Movable Type proper in its Professional incarnation, Arvind Satyanarayan deserves a great degree of kudos for developing this plugin, which gives users the much-requested ability to create any fields of their choosing beyond the traditional "title", "date" and "entry" options that come as standard with blogging software. The DVD and review sections wouldn't have been possible without his hard work.

And that's about it, really. In case you're interested, the whole thing was hand-coded using a cool free text editor called Notepad++ (think Windows' Notepad only significantly more powerful and with a more advanced UI), with graphics work done in Adobe Photoshop CS3. I hope you enjoy the new design and find it both a little more eye-pleasing and a little slicker from a navigation standpoint. See you in the funny pages!

7 Comments

 
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