As you would have noticed already, the colour scheme has changed further over the last week. For that you can thank Jennie’s “pus and blood scheme” comment which, if a bit stark, was quite apt I thought. I realise the Libcon look and feel is still a bit inconsistent and I’m working on that. Suggestions always welcome.
I should have announced this earlier but… I’m pleased to announced that Alix Mortimer, Mat Bowles and Laurie Penny have joined as regular contributors. There’s more changes to the LC contributors coming, but I’m currently in the process of launching our next campaign (more tomorrow hopefully) so am busy with that.
Lastly, (and this is for the computer geeks only) I’ve enabled WP-Cache for this blog because the front page layout makes more database queries than a normal blog would. My only problem is that the ‘Recent Comments’ tab on the right doesn’t update when cacheing is enabled. Anyone know how I can still keep that dynamic?
And the front page isn’t updating either once I publish a new post :(
With WP Cache, you have to wait for the current cached version of the front page (or any page) to expire before it is updated. There should be an option to set the cache time lower in settings if there’s a huge and annoying delay :-)
Yes, its set to every hour for now. But I want to keep the comments box on the side dynamic, because its a light sql query I wrote to pull comments etc. Isn’t there a way to keep certain pages or sections stay dynamic I wonder?
LOL it’s more ketchup and orange juice now, so at least it’s a bit more edible ;)
YAY for Alix and Mat and Laurie!
Without the rest of the ink blotchs those two above the I’s look a little odd now. The title would look better without them imo.
I dunno, Leon. It makes it more of a logo and less of a bit of typing to have the splats. I’m quite fond of them.
There’s no easy way to cache parts of the page, certainly not on the client. You could, I suppose, include the latest comments section as the contents of an iframe, which can be generated dynamically, leaving the rest of the page alone. It’s not a tactic I would use for showing the number of comments on individual articles, though.
You can reduce database hits (and thence speed up page serving) by using a “publish” model for most of the page - use a cron job to republish the front page HTML every hour or so, and then put placeholders in the HTML that can be stripped out at page-request-time and replaced with the dynamic content you want.
Honestly, I’m surprised that you’re having trouble with database throughput here - perhaps you need to put some more indexes on your tables to speed up querying?
I dunno, Leon. It makes it more of a logo and less of a bit of typing to have the splats. I’m quite fond of them.
I hear what you’re saying, it just seems the loss of the other splashes has diluted the branding a bit, having them as mere dots looks a bit tokenistic to my eyes now.
There’s nothing wrong with straight text if the colour and font are right!
Hi sanbikinoraion, I’m not having trouble with the database yet, but I am worried that if the user numbers suddenly spike up then there’s a danger it’ll fall over.
This wordpress installation uses more database queries than normal because I have avbout 4 loops on the front page, not the usual one that other blogs have. Right now Wp-Cache updates everything every hour anyway, but I just want to keep certain bits more dynamic than others.
Leon - no I like the logo as it is :)
Ooh, it’s slightly buggered in IE - I only knocked it up as a demo for firefox :)
sanbikinoraion,
I like! it! Very nice indeed. I’d move latest blogs to the main section next to the casting net in the middle and probably a few other small things but really like it. Sunny will hate it because he doesn’t like too black on the page though. :P
Oh yeah very neat logo too.:)
Hi sanbikinoraion, I think its an interesting design. Its good, but I think it’ll need a much busier LC and with more more content before we can move to that. But I’ve saved a screenshot and may use some ideas for it. This site will continue to evolve with its users don’t worry.
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