Aaaah.. it looks just like the old days! I like...

Much much quicker, easier to log in for a quick sneak around in work now.

Good work.

And since Idiot Kid wrote these words I have made the site even faster. Way, I repeat: WAY, faster. Yes, I have just successfully implemented two new things to make this site faster:

1) I set up compression on the site. Basically what it means is that when you visit a page the all singing, all dancing CLUAS web server compresses the file BEFORE it is sent over the internet to your browser, i.e. a smaller amount of data for each page needs to travel over the internet to you, so it gets quicker to you. When the file is received by your computer your browser 'decompresses' the page. (Geek alert: the CLUAS site uses Gzip to do this compression). So how much smaller are the files? Well the Soap Box forum main page is normally about 48kb. After compressing it is 13.5kb, a reduction in size of a whopping 70%.
2) I also set up a 'white space filter' on the site so that (some but not all) pointless 'white spaces' in the HTML code are removed. This means that the pages are reduced by about 10-15% or so in size (geek comment: I think that the compression function would probably 'remove' these white spaces anyway at the moment of compression so I wonder how much an impact the removal of 'white space' has when you are also running compression...).

These 2 considerable performance improvements are directly related to the new version of the technology running the site (DotNetNuke v4.4.1) which I installed successfully the other night, which introduced these two possibilities for the first time. I have to say I am finding it an amazing technology. Onwards and upwards, etc.

Next challenge? Rolling out the first CLUAS blogs. I got stuck into the nitty-gritty of it last night, made some real progress but I am not yet finished there just yet. More anon.

eoghan

There are also a few other tweaks I made last night to the Discussion board, they were more cosmetic in nature. More tweaks to the rest of the site will happen in the coming days (e.g. the Nav bar is a bit banjaxed in some browsers for some pages).

After a slow, challenging and often frustrating migration to this new technolgy platform I feel we are at last getting it into the necessary shape. In an ideal world this should have been all sorted ages ago. But it ain't ideal as we all know. Especially if you're slow off the 'geek blocks' like I am (the blank look on may face you would see if i was ever asked to write even a line of code speaks volumes).

Cheers for the paitience. 2007 is (at last) shaping up nicely for the site.

Eoghan

Yep the discussion board is running much more smoothly now - up to this I've still been having trouble signing it without my puter going crazy 50pc of the time, but all is now well :-) (happy Anna)