January 12, 2020
Still Hacking
January 12, 2020
I have been satisfied with the overall look and feel of the site for a while now, so it became time to clean up the code. A lot of features and ideas were scabbed-on in whatever way worked, resulting in a lot of kludgy code and redundancy. Some things ( like the main navigation menu ) became so convoluted that it was hard to predict exactly what they would do.
So I re-wrote much of it in a much more streamlined and efficient way. WordPress offers lots of neat little functions that look trivial, but actually hide trips to the database, which are SLOW. I eliminated as many of those as I could. The result is a 25-50% improvement in run times on the server. That should translate into better speed ratings from Gargle, but alas, no.
Then I wrote a little script that takes all the individual css files and combines them into one big one on the server. So instead of all the individual files going out separately, they go as one big glob. With no other changes, and no change in the apparent load times, my speed ratings on Gargle immediately went from mediocre to excellent. I guess that's all they care about. Idiots.
I also fixed a pretty bad glitch in the system - none of the pages had html titles. That's not too noticeable to people - just the text that you pay no attention to in the tab bar - but it matters to search engines. Gargle crawls this site a lot, and I've seen some pretty good page ranks. Having proper page titles should only make things better. I'm seeing similar results at Bing.
