Slow Verus Fast Access For your Visitors
A recent article about site access speed posted over at Lorelle on WordPress started me thinking about my own path of site development over the last 7 years. The article talks about how up until recently most people were using dial up phone connections to reach the internet, and most sites needed to be optimized for this slow speed in order to be successful. This is true with sites I’ve developed, especially the first generation version of the Stupid and Insane Defenders Against Chaos webcomic site. The new version of the site is based now on WordPress and has many new features, but it’s also much larger and “slower” to load if you were to use a dial up connection. I think I subconsciously resisted moving to a new platform for a long time based on my thought that we’d be dropping support for slower connections, but as times change you do need to move on eventually. I’ve tried to keep the new site to a loading time that makes sense and isn’t really too bloated–I still find no need for unneeded flashy AJAX stuff or flash movie embeds, but I think most new site developers really have no desire to be restrained at all. And while cell phones and wireless systems are getting faster, mobile devices, and many libraries and school computer rooms will still feel like dial up in some ways when loading sites, a key thing many new developers forget about. It’s a balancing act and you need to think about your audience and what things are really needed for your site. I’d definitely suggest checking out Lorelle’s post to read more about the subject.
WordPress 2.6.2 out now, Security Update
WordPress 2.6.2 has been released and it’s a security update that everyone should apply who’s using 2.6. It’s not a major update so it shouldn’t break anything on your site.
If It’s Not one thing….
It’s another. It looks like I’ll be away for about a week taking care of some family related business. This will unfortunately impact my ability to update the site and code. So It looks like another week of delay until I can get some new updates out.
Pi-Con weekend
Hi Everyone, This weekend I’ll be at Pi-Con. I’ll be part of a panel on “Smart Web Design” on Friday night. It’s basically a panel about what you should be thinking about when you start a website, as well as what you should consider in terms of how your visitors will interact with your site. It’s going to be pretty informal and may even end up as an open Q/A session for anyone who wants suggestions on issues they’ve encountered along the way to becoming Internet Famous. This will be my last distraction for a long time, I promise. :)
Webcomics Using AWSOM Plugins: Onezumi.com (finally)
I’m very happy to announce that there is now another webcomic out there using some of the AWSOM plugins: Onezumi.com (finally!). For those of you unaware, Onezumi.com (also known as Stupid and Insane Defenders Against Chaos) is a webcomic that I work on that has finally moved over to using WordPress as it’s backend system. As part of this conversion it uses all three of the AWSOM plugins (and honestly, in many ways the development of the plugins here were always earmarked as part of the future components of the new site).
The launch of the new site has been taking up a ton of my time. I expect that after this week (and this weekend’s con appearance) I will finally be back in the programming loop of things, so expect the long awaited releases of all of the plugins soon.