CSFW Update Log

This week I had a chance and updated some of the programming of the Update Pages (the blog).

Notably I was able to speed up the blog by about 60% by using a caching plugin for Wordpress called WP Super Cache.  Being a dynamic site, Wordpress would recreate every post every time it was accessed. Now every post/page will have a static version in good old html stored in the cache.   It’s much faster.

I also have finally found a gallery program that I like.  The new one is another Wordpress plugin.  It’s called NEXGEN Gallery.  I’ve upgraded all the recent posts for the 2008.01 Azure Njord to the new gallery system.  I’ve also created a new gallery with construction pictures of the guitar.  Below is the album that it creates.  Clicking on the thumbnail will bring up the gallery in this page.  Each image can then be brought up full-size. You call also view the pictures in a slideshow.  Try it out.

2008. 12 Guitar - Beauty Shots

21 Photos

2008.12 Guitar - Construction

100 Photos

I’m also working on a better more user-friendly sidebar. That’s going to take longer…

Dan

I got inspired by Björn Thomasson’s excellent site and took a small step to clean up my own. I’m now using permalinks for my posts.  Under the old system this post would have been something like this:

http://clearstreamwood.com/WordPress/?p=888 for instance.  Now it’s more user-friendly:

http://clearstreamwood.com/WordPress/website/better-blog-links

The underlining structure is still the same.  If you have links to previous posts using the old naming system they’ll still be valid and work fine.  If anything sees amiss let me know…

I’m also in the process of upgrading to a better gallery system.  In the process I lost the images from a lot of my older posts.  When I have time I’ll try and replace them.  Until then I can fill requests as needed.

Dan

I just upgraded Wordpress from 2.2 to 2.6.  My webhost did it semi-automatically.  I have to upgrade a few plugins along the way and it handles special characters differently so things may look a little different for a while.  I’m also looking to reintergrate Gallery2 into Wordpress and having it run most of the site.  In a few months it should be a lot easier to navigate… hopefully.

Let me know if any thing is out of whack!

Dan

The past couple of weeks you may have noticed that the clearstreamwood.com website seems to take forever to load. Once loaded it works fine. This week I finally got fed up and contacted my web-host. It got kicked up to some of the higher engineers who just got back to me. Hopefully we’ll see a difference soon…

They also just upgraded to a new hosting platform so I’ve had to do some work on my end. The form on the “Contact Us” page still isn’t working. I hope to figure that out this week. Thanks for your patience.

Dan

Update (03/27/2008 08:00 EST): Form working fine.  I needed to transfer some new code over because of the transition.

Hello Dan,

Thank you for contacting us.

I am writing this with regard to the ticket # xxxxxxx.

I have checked the domain and it loads fine with a bit delay of 15-20 seconds. We understand the depth of frustration when the website loads slowly and we really apologize for the inconvenience. We are aware of the website slowness issue and our higher technical engineers are working on it and the issue will be fixed at the earliest.
Also, we are in a process of adding more servers to overcome the website slowness issue and the issue related to website slowness will be fixed permanently.

If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We are available 24/7.

Sincerely,

Patsy Jensen
Technical Specialist

Just wanted to let you all know the new Gallery is up and running. It’s definitely different. All good-olde HTML courtesy of iWeb on my MacBook. It looks very close to the theme of the website. A few differences (mostly in the links) but close… It’s not the cleanest way of doing it but it’ll never have the database issues. I still have the old Gallery2 on standby to feed the old blog entries.
One new feature is I combined the “Previous Projects” page with the Gallery. Pictures and basic project info on one page for each major project. The new Gallery/Previous Projects page is now here:

http://clearstreamwood.com/gallery/Gallery.html

Update your links. With a re-write this big I’m bound to have missed something. Le me know if I did…

The next update will probably be after Christmas. Wait until you see the stuff I built for Christmas! I’ve been a busy beaver. Fun stuff. Until then may I and my family wish you and yours a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanuka, Kwanzaa, (fill in holiday as needed) and a Happy New Year.

Dan, Christine, Lena, “egg” and the rest of the Caouette Pack