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Many many headaches soon to be gone forever!

Chris Chance — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 22:56:07 +0000

After a long break from NexTechNews, I should be back to posting at a regular level again in the next week or 2, why, you ask? Well simple the server will soon no longer suck, we already moved to the new Quad Core 6600 and 8gb of ram monster. But the site is still slow, why? Because we were running all of our blogs in a virtual server, which honestly sucks. So we’re moving now to PHP 5.2.13 (5.3.2 is buggy as shit on fastcgi), IIS7, Server 2008, and WinCache 1.1 to keep things really fast :)

This should all be active by the end of March on all of our websites, will keep everyone posted as things progress.

Notice some speed improvements? See I do care :)

Chris Chance — Sun, 17 May 2009 13:49:18 +0000

Well if your visiting the site today you might notice that the sites loading a good bit faster, this is thanks to some major debugging on my side to figure out what the hell was going on. With the help of FireBug and YSlow (awesome tool really, you can check both of them out in the firefox addon catalog). I managed to rein things in to 3 factors, larger than necessary images, misplaced javascripts and a widget i loved but was causing things to slow down way too much.

1. The image sizes, ok heres something awesome for those of you guys with wordpress blogs, as you know I just moved to wordpress… GO INSTALL WP Smush it’s frigging awesome, YSlow pointed me to try out YSmushIt, and after i saw that many of my images on the homepage alone could save 10-30% in size with 0 loss I decided to check and yep their was a wordpress plugin (god isn’t their a wordpress plugin for everything). Basically what it does is it sends the image before post or upon request from the media library to Yahoo!’s SmushIt API and it in turn strips away excess metadata and colors in indexed images and returns you a streamlined clean image. This plugin reduced load times and bandwidth consumption a little.

2. Javascript love, Ok I love my java and so do the advertisers but it was getting a little wacky their were 20 javascripts external running on this page, WP Minify fixed this up and compressed them into 1 tidy file (well theres still the advertisers but thats because they don’t play nice with Wp Minify yet so i had to add an exception)

3. The last thing that I changed to day is the pretty category cloud is gone, I know it was pretty but in reality it wasn’t really that useful, but the main reason it’s gone is because well… it halted page load times quite a bit and almost doubled the page load time, a big no no for my site.

So anyway hope you guys notice the speed improvements and they help in the experience on the site. As for updates to the site I’ll be getting back to posting probably at the end of the month as that’s when I’m hopefully going to be back in my own apartment :) YAY

Where the heck have I been?!?

Chris Chance — Thu, 14 May 2009 13:34:26 +0000

So where the hell have I been, moving that’s where or shall I say in the middle of moving. See we were supposed to be moving into a new apartment closer to my and my wifes jobs to cut our travel time in 1/3 but it turns out that since our contract was up at the old place we had to move out before the new place was ready (it was a brand new unfinished apartment we were waiting on). So we’ve been living in my mother-in-law’s house for a 2 months now going on 3 waiting for the new apartment to be ready.

Well finally this week we got the news that it’s done and we went to see it and definitly will be moving in, we’re just waiting on word from the owners on final price and the ok for us to move in and we’ll be moved in. I’ll be back to posting and updating the site on a regular basis at that point but as it currently stands I’m still working on getting a new computer as well as my desktop barely wanted to come on before we moved, so after sitting off for 3 months in a box I doubt it will even turn back on, but fear not one way or another I’ll be back to updating the site on a regular basis and hopefully much more actively than even before we moved as I really want to get back into the multiple daily updates and not just the big news announcements that I hear about. But more on that will be coming soon after we get moved in and I get a new computer up and running.

Twitter Updater goodbye, hello WP to Twitter

Chris Chance — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 19:32:44 +0000

Well after some fussing i finally got the update from twitter updater to WP to Twitter finalized and the site is now operational on WP to Twitter so our followers on twitter should now see the titles properly for the … Continue reading →

The move to WordPress

Chris Chance — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 19:19:10 +0000

Well after fighting it for a very long time we’ve decided to move to wordpress and as you can see it’s just launched, things may be a little bit hit and miss at the start as we’re busy relaunching, we’re hoping to maintain 100% link compatability with our old link structure. As you know the old way of permalinks were really really nasty so the fact that we’re making this move is going to be a bit difficult as we’ve got a few thousand pages that all need to seemlessly transfer over.

Our fear is that we’ll loose PageRank or we’ll loose our indexing power in google, but due to the fact that only 1/2 our pages were getting indexed, and the tremendous number of plugins and third-party wordpress support we felt it was time to move to WordPress, not because it’s PHP, no I still love my ASP.NET as you’ll see on all my other sites, but the fact is we needed to move to a platform with the wide range of third party plugin support, and WordPress just has this part of the market cornered.