Hope you all will pardon a brief interruption in the flow of iPhone posts – just to give you a bit of a heads-up on some site changes we’ve been making recently. We’ve had some issues with a few plugins that were behaving badly and causing slowness and other headaches. I’ve been working hard to get these fixed and to generally improve the site’s performance.
I think we now have most of our slowness issues resolved (touch wood), and we even have several nice snappy improvements to talk about. Read on for some more detail on what we’ve changed, and what we hope has improved …
The things we have dropped from the site – as they were identified as not helping us to have the site perform as well as it can – are: the random posts (Further Reading) listing in the sidebar, the ‘fancier’ rendering of recent comments in the sidebar (comments are still there, just not displayed as nicely IMO), the showing of the number of times a post has been viewed above each post and the ‘Top Posts’ page showing the most popular posts since the site started, and the extra anti-spam coverage that used a captcha method.
Some of these I won’t miss much; others I will miss very much and I will probably try to find replacements for some, that do not result in any performance hit.
On the plus side though, I am very happy to say that some improvements you should see include:
Speedy-ness – We’ve added a page cache-ing plugin that has given us a supersonic, warp speed improvement to page load times. I hope you are all seeing much faster page loads as well.
Improved iPhone Version – the plugin we use has recently been updated and added more nice features – like being able to access Categories from a prominent top bar link. You can also now login successfully from the top bar link or the one down towards the bottom of pages – and comments should be working well from within the iPhone view. There is still a bit of awkwardness when logging out – but things work much better than before.
Lijit Search Alternative – has been added. You can find it towards the very bottom of the righthand sidebar. The standard search bar is still right where it always has been (at top right) – but Lijit offers a cool alternative – its search incorporates not just this site, but all the good sites listed under our ‘Favorite Sites’ section. It also lets you check out what I’ve been sharing via Twitter, Friendfeed and Digg etc, via handy little icons above its search bar.
Google Reader Shared Items – speaking of sharing, there’s a widget in our sidebar (has been there a few weeks) which shows my recent Google Reader Shared Items. I’m hoping some of these may be interesting to some of you. It’s a combination of IPhone related things that I find of interest but don’t have time / inclination to blog about, general tech and mobile tech stories, and assorted oddball stuff that strikes me as funny or interesting in some way.
Tweeting / Digging Made Easier – hopefully most of you have already noticed the new ‘Tweet This’ and ‘Digg This’ buttons below each post. And hopefully they make it damn near impossible to resist sharing our posts with folks around the webz when you think they’re worthwhile. This is a huge and much, much appreciated way of supporting our efforts here.
I’m aware of one problem so far with our new setup – when you add a new comment to a post, the page does not always refresh as fast as would be desirable (because of the new cache-ing) – so your comment may not show up immediately. It will appear after a few minutes. I’m looking into this and seeking to get it going better as well.
Tell Us What You Think …
I would love to hear your feedback – good, bad or indifferent – on these recent site changes, and whether you are seeing improvements. Also, I’d love to hear any ideas you have on how we could improve the site, the things we cover, anything along those lines is very, very welcome.
Want To Write for JAiB?
Lastly, if any of you would be interested in writing for JAiB, I’d also love to hear from you. Mail me at patrickATjustanotheriphoneblogDOTcom if you’re interested. I’m not bothered about whether you have much blogging experience or not – would just like to hear from folks who are big-time iPhone enthusiasts and would like to write about the sorts of subjects we cover here. Oh, and please tell me in your email that you are *very* strong on spelling and grammar and such, or that you will make a big effort to become strong – as I do not want to spend huge chunks of time editing basic stuff.
Continue reading:
- Everything New Apple Just Announced (Septembe
- Apple Watch Pre-Order
- Apple Research Kit launches with 5 Apps
- Apple TV now only $69
TAGS: Site News
