Thought i’d see how many of Google’s “page speed” recommendations I could go about implementing on here. It is very much a work in progress, but there should be some slightly noticeable rendering time improvements to the site (probably actually not noticeable at all if you’re on a super fast connection, or generally don’t pay attention to these things ^^;). The changes so far are as follows:

• Majority of images now on an img.pori.co.uk subdomain. This ended up with me fixing lots of outdated broken stuff in the database, lol, who’d have thought there’d still be links pointing to ccgi.aqyo577.plus.com, that was where this site used to be back in 2005-2006 on the old pocari domain. Heh back in 2006… up until the point where they decided to have an epic server fail and lost everyone’s websites: http://www.pori.co.uk/?p=235 I never did recover the fullsize versions of those images. Ahh well, I have magical things called backups now. (incidentally plus.net also managed to delete 700GB of customers emails around that time too, oh how I remember their incompetence well, lol, anyway, rambling now…)
• There is no more external javascript or css files on things in the sidebar, it is all hosted here. Upshot: they should load faster. Downside: The xbox gamercard thing is gone until I find a way of re-writing my own one, oh and the dartslive thing is gone too… until I go back to Japan and actually play more than 1 game of darts on it, lol.
• Compression enabled for all .php pages and the main stylesheet (this won’t work if you’re running some ancient ie 5 or netscape navigator or something, lol).
• Many other minor changes…

Stuff still to do:

• Start hosting videos here instead of linking to youtube (speed benefit and won’t end up with posts linking to videos that no longer exist).
• Compress all of the javascript files.
• “Use efficient CSS selectors” …whatever that means??

Things in theory shouldn’t be broken anywhere right now, but i’ve only tested the site in Firefox 3.6, Internet Explorer 8, and the latest beta build of Chrome. If anyone (especially anyone using a browser other than those three) notices a problem then let me know.

After god knows how long, i finally got around to updating the look of this site. New features as follows:

• New theme (should have been pretty obvious… if it all looks messed up hit ctrl-f5 to refresh your cache), theme has support for wordpress’s widgets (makes administering the sidebar far easier), and quite frankly looks shinier.
• New gallery system in the photo’s section – not using a plugin, using wordpress’s new built in galleries, much nicer, and the alignment isn’t messed up. Note that you can also add comments to galleries now.
• Lightbox on all image thumbnails – click thumbnail, get lightbox popup, very sleek, lol (see example below). Works in the photo’s section too.
• An actual logo instead of that naff scribble from before. Beautifully drawn by Taruto! Thankyou!!! After much thought (read: 5 minutes randomly babbling sounds) it was decided she’d be called “Poro-chan” (unless anyone has any better suggestions).

…it’s only taken me 2 months (even though all the work basically only totalled 3 days or so, lol). Glad it’s done though, the galleries look much nicer now.

As far as i’m aware there’s only 2 minor issues at the moment, and they both only affect internet explorer. The first of which wont get fixed anytime soon (if ever)… the grey/black bit on the navigation bar is 1 pixel out next to the part where the buttons end, no idea how to fix this in internet explorer without making it 1 pixel out in other browsers. The 2nd issue is that the buttons appear to be a slightly different shade of grey to the rest of the bar… might have an idea on how to fix it, we’ll see (note: since it all works perfect in Firefox and that’s what i use to view the interwebs then i’m not going to be too bothered about ever fixing it myself). If you really can’t live with an odd pixel then install a decent web browser, lol.

If anyone else notices any problems, let me know, it’s entirely possible i’ve missed glaring errors all over the place, lol.

Moving house this weekend, never done it before, should be interesting (so long as i’m not too hungover from the leaving party for me at work on friday, lol). Moving some 96 miles (155 kilometres) north-ish:

(indicated by the small red arrow to the left of London… map may not be 100% accurate, lol)

And i updated the site to use WordPress 2.5 yesterday. While i have to admit the backend is looking very sleek now (the keyword there being “looking”), i’m somewhat miffed that it seems to have broken image uploading, lol (it took me almost 30 minutes to get that map picture uploaded there, lol), not to mention that the latest version of the photopress plugin just plainly didn’t work at all. Ahh well. When wordpress fixes the 2.5 image uploader i’ll probably migrate the gallery’s away from the photopress plugin and use wordpress’s new internal gallery thing instead anyway.

However… most important at the moment is getting an internet connection that is not as slow as a dead walrus after i have moved… i mean waiting for youtube to buffer wtf?! Damn backwater Middle-England hicks with their crappy telephone lines, anyone’d think it was Wales.

EDIT: image uploader now fixed (blah, mod_security, .htaccess etc.), so i shall be trying out what the new gallery thing is like (if anyone notices a “Photos2″ suddenly appearing at the top then that’ll be it), maybe it’ll even be able to space images evenly in a page, lol.

Site upgraded to wordpress 2.3 now. Only minor issue was something to do with wordpress’s character set, i assumed it was all UTF-8, but apparantly the tables in the database were still set to some old wordpress default (despite the database, and wordpress’s settings saying UTF-8), lol. So odd characters and the photo album broke miserably, lol.

Converted the whole database to UTF-8 (as it should have been already), and everything *should* be working fine now. If anyone notices anything broken, especially relating to odd characters and ??’s where there shouldn’t be, please let me know.

EDIT2: Blah… too much effort… too lazy… given up, lol. If only these things could automate themselves, or i had an army of harvest sprites i could pay with flour to do my work for me. Don’t let this stop you from voting in the tournament though, instructions are still linked to below, lol.

EDIT: UPDATED…

Was gonna post about this at some point anyway.

First things first, for anyone that doesn’t know of the saimoe tournament, it’s basically an annual tournament organized on 2ch to determine the most moe character from the past year.

Official site and tournament bracket here: http://animemoe2007.hp.infoseek.co.jp/

Voting instructions on the 2nd post here: http://forums.animesuki.com/showthread.php?p=1079605

Ok (for anyone that read the original post here, that naff thing on the side has been removed, lol, decided to make a separate section), there’s a Saimoe2007 section on the top navigation bar, clicking that will take you to the saimoe section of my site.

I shall be posting updates there daily (hopefully, lol) with results for the previous day, and pictures etc. of the current contenders. It’s slightly bare at the moment, but content will be there as from today.

It’s in a separate section because i didn’t want it cluttering up the main page with posts, just think of it as a blog within a blog, lol.

So, get voting and enjoy the tournament. And if you’ve never voted before, now’s the time to start… instructions are linked to above.

(NANOHA TO WIN!)