Continuing with the post detailing some of the changes that I have been making to my site here is another one!

Performance Improvements

You may have noticed that the homepage has been changed slightly, one of the things that has been changed is the latest blog posts are no longer being pulled down from my blog RSS feed, instead I am pulling the data directly from the wordpress database, and as a result the homepage (and every other page with the footer) has seen a significant performance increase, which is a very welcome improvement.

Login Service

Some of you may have seen the new login design, although the old one did what it was supposed to it didn’t really do everything that I wanted it to do, and a better more versatile layout was needed.

In a move to improve the login experience I have added the ability for the system to remember what page you were on before you logged in and will then return you to that page once the login process is complete. One thing that I have left out from the revision is the “stay logged in” feature that existed in part before, I decided that unless there was a public out-cry, the hour idle time is sufficient, since for every page refresh the cookie resets the expiration time back to an hour.

Events API

The events API is almost completed, currently all of the functions to get the event data have been implemented and can be seen at the Events API Documentation, more improvements will come over time, for instance the ability to add events to the database (Something that I’m still thinking about from a security perspective).

Future Upgrades

In the coming 6 months I am planning quite a few updates. The first of which will be a site refresh (whic has started already), nothing too drastic, the overall design will be the same, but there will be improvements to the layout of the pages and more improvements to the backend system.

Most of the sections of the site will encompass the idea of Landing pages, something that has been on my list for a while, and something that I partially implemented with the Services and Events sections, although there will need to be more improvements. Along with the better landing page approach will be some integration work with other sections on the site, like the blog or photography section, for example, an event listing would have photos from last year displayed on the same page as well as related blog posts and other things like that. This will hopefully integrate the other previously standalone sections into each other and hopefully make for a better visiting experience.

The photography section is currently powered by the Flickr API and Satellite although heavily customised, one feature I would like to implement is some sort of caching on the data that it pulls down from Flickr, each time the page loads the Flickr API is called and the photos / data is downloaded, this of course isn’t a very good idea from a performance perspective, so I would like to work on this area to improve the performance.

WordPress Integration is another item on the list, this would be in the form of registering and login operations, so when a new account is created, a wordpress account is also inititiated and when a user signs in they are automatically logged in to wordpress too.