| Create Digital Noise Forum Index » General / Chat » The New, Faster-Loading (if not as pretty) CDM |
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Like the new plain-text headlines?
| Yes, the site is loading much faster now! |
| [ 5 ] 62% |
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| Yes, but I still want the site to load faster than it is. |
| [ 1 ] 12% |
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| No. They're ugly, and I don't notice the site loading any faster. |
| [ 2 ] 25% |
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| No. They're ugly. I'll wait as long as needed for an aesthetically superior site. |
| [ 0 ] 0% |
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Total Votes : 8 |
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| PeterKirn |
 Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 2:01 pm |
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Site Admin
Joined: 03 Feb 2006
Posts: 822
Location: New York, NY
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Okay, we heard you. Yes, CDM was loading fairly painfully slowly. (Hey, we're supposed to be the only site you read, so you hit the main page, get a cup of coffee, and come back to our perfectly-rendered visuals.)
Right now, we're experimenting with ways of improving performance. First step is disabling Flash image replacement for headlines. While this gives prettier headlines, it was rendering as quickly as we hoped, and did occasionally cause compatibility issues. (Theoretically, if you don't have Flash installed, it's supposed to roll back to plain text, and usually does, but I have heard isolated incidents where that wasn't working.)
We're not done -- there are some other bottlenecks to evaluate, and template cleaning to do. But let me know how this is working for you.
Hope to have more updates soon ... |
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| thesimplicity |
| Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 6:02 pm |
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Joined: 07 Apr 2006
Posts: 122
Location: Tucson, AZ
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Why not just use dynamic text replacement via PHP? That way it'd just be cached on the server and it wouldn't have to re-render it everytime someone loaded the page.
There are tons of different ways to do this, but a good example is here. |
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| bliss |
| Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 8:00 pm |
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Joined: 03 Aug 2006
Posts: 695
Location: Here.
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| Yep, it be ugly alright. Funny, though, because it doesn't seem to be loading any faster for me than it was. 
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| velocipede |
| Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 9:32 pm |
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Joined: 08 Apr 2006
Posts: 94
Location: Takarazuka, Japan
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| I usually just read the site using RSS! |
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| PeterKirn |
| Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 10:27 pm |
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Site Admin
Joined: 03 Feb 2006
Posts: 822
Location: New York, NY
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| We have some other speed enhancements planned, and based on feedback, I think we may investigate a way of making it look a little less fugly. Thanks for the tip, thesimplicity -- we'll keep researching. |
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| vdmoKstaTi |
| Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 10:11 am |
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Joined: 02 Oct 2006
Posts: 31
Location: www.milkcommunity.com
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Hey Peter, don't forget to include Google ads in your RSS feeds  // jokes
I think having Text links as headers is more then fine. You are running fairly busy website and I would imagine visitors return would be frequent being content driven and all.
Sure you can use dynamic fonts and Dynamic text, - plenty of this been done previously but I would always pick speed of use over extra touch of style at the cost of users time.
Another note, this time on CDM. Every now and then, Digital Motion has slight tendency to wait for all the content to load while keeping background red before white background loads. I haven't totally searched deep into every little bit of css/xhtml here but my guess if you add background-color:fff; in #pagecontainer it being the main container.. it will flop out in white background a lot quicker... i've viewed this in ie and firefox.. both have similar tendancy.
http://createdigitalmotion.com/wp-content/themes/cdmotion/style.css
Code:
#pagecontainer {
background-color: #fff;
width: 860px;
margin: 0px auto;
}
This way you can start reading top headers for articles right away. I probably should have mentioned this to Jaymis, but he is on holidays.
I could look into further if need be. be happy to help out. |
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| PeterKirn |
| Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 1:48 pm |
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Site Admin
Joined: 03 Feb 2006
Posts: 822
Location: New York, NY
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Hmmm ... that doesn't work, because the white is laid on top of the blue for the blue background / background image. (Didn't think it would work, but tried your code just in case ... no such luck.)
I think something like this *should* work ... just a matter of sorting the CSS, and I'm no expert.
Jaymis will be back soon, so we'll get on this, and may well take you up on your offer of help! |
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| velocipede |
| Posted: Sat Dec 09, 2006 9:42 pm |
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Joined: 08 Apr 2006
Posts: 94
Location: Takarazuka, Japan
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| I don't mind a few adds in my RSS feeds. If you can make some money from the site, you can make it better. Cheers! |
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| bliss |
| Posted: Tue Dec 19, 2006 2:43 pm |
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Joined: 03 Aug 2006
Posts: 695
Location: Here.
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| It's loading very slowly for me today, everything, pages and posting comments. |
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| PeterKirn |
| Posted: Tue Dec 19, 2006 2:55 pm |
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Site Admin
Joined: 03 Feb 2006
Posts: 822
Location: New York, NY
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Hi bliss,
FYI, we're dealing with a number of problems unrelated to our optimization of the site's static code. Basically, it runs something like this:
1. We get kicked off a shared host for overusing CPU resources. This is not unusual for a site doing the traffic CDM does; it's not enormous, but it's enough that it costs money and shared services don't like to host actual traffic.
2. We move to what we hoped would be a more robust shared service, the media temple Grid servers. Performance improves, but it looks like they'll charge us some significant "overages" for CPU and resource utilization, so we decide it makes sense to upgrade to a more reliable, more cost-effective "Dedicated Virtual" server.
3. The moment we move to DV, everything goes awry. First, they had their web server configured in a way that it didn't handle the traffic we experience. Then, once we fixed that, we had a few normal days. Since Friday, though, the site has been becoming slow, unresponsive, or crashing completely and requiring a reboot because of what appears to be a performance / memory allocation issue.
Jaymis and I have been working on this problem nearly round the clock. The basic summary is, we're moving to a real dedicated server AND making major optimizations to the way the site runs in terms of back-end plug-ins. But we can't move servers until after Christmas, and in the meantime, it's a bit of a nightmare.
I don't like to have to advertise technical problems on the main site, of course; I'm trying to keep everything up in the meantime.
But anyway -- it's not just you! |
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| bliss |
| Posted: Tue Dec 19, 2006 4:04 pm |
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Joined: 03 Aug 2006
Posts: 695
Location: Here.
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| Yeah, I wondered if it was just me. But I posted to sound an alert (virus, DOS, hacked site, etc.) just in case something needed tending to. Thanks for the info. |
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| PeterKirn |
| Posted: Tue Dec 19, 2006 4:15 pm |
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Site Admin
Joined: 03 Feb 2006
Posts: 822
Location: New York, NY
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Absolutely!
Hacked ... that did actually happen once, but we plugged the hole.
The site has always run on Linux servers. Now I'm not sure what's going on with performance, because my whole Interwebs are at a crawl ... maybe something with my own personal connection here in lower Manhattan.
Or maybe it's just lunchtime.
Anyway, we still have our goal of delivering far better performance than in the past. I think we'll have everything sorted by New Year's. 2007 should be a better year for CDM's reliability, design, and speed than 2006.  |
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