Site News: New Design

Golf R Meetup - 2015, Berkshires, MA - VW Vortex

Two weeks ago, I did a test of a new design on my beer blog. I heard from a dozen people over email, text, etc that said they really liked it. While the design is not in its final form, this iteration is at a place where I don’t mind replicating it to the main blog. The main blog gets the majority of my server traffic so I take changes quite seriously. There are more things I want to do like add more contextual links at the bottom of page and add support for wide photo posts. The thing is, most of the stuff I’d like to add slows the page down. If I were to embed Flickr or Instagram widgets on my beer blog, it adds additional Javascript calls and slows the site down.

Additionally, my photo posts here like the recent drive with a few other car-people last week does request data from Flickr which is why I’m going to utilize “Read More” links on all posts that have more than 2-3 photos. This will allow people who browse directly to my blog to opt-in to clicking “Read More” which will trigger the process of calling a dozen photos from Flickr. Note these are just basic IMG HTML tags, no Javascript is being used but it still takes time. If you’re an RSS Subscriber, you’ll get full-posts including photos in your feed. I’m not selling ads so I have no incentive to drive people to my website directly. It’s a waste of your time.

Why not store these photos myself? I don’t see any reason to use my bandwidth when Yahoo is giving me all of theirs for free. I never plan on cancelling Flickr Pro so don’t see an issue and one day, when Flickr is no more I’ll just have to put in a ton of work to fix the issue. That likelihood is very slim so it’s just a calculated risk I chose to take up a few years back.

This blog is taking up 1.92 megabytes and the beer blog is taking 2.5 megabytes of data to load. The main culprit is photos that are hot linked to Flickr. 

Anyway, enjoy the new lightweight website and let me know if you have any feedback. Of course, since this blog and my beer blog have comments permanently removed, you’l have to use email if you want to reach me. 

PS: I still have a huge interest in Photo a Day style blogging and I’d like to eventually setup some sub-domain w/ a WordPress installation to handle this. The only issue is, most off-the-shelf WordPress themes don’t cover everything. I want a wide 1400 pixel canvas without any border, just black or white and the ability for the user to scroll infinitely without any Flash and they can view Geo-tag with a link that resolves a map call to Google’s API and another section that displays EXIF data. If anyone knows of a solution for something that’s very lightweight and would allow me to showcase a photo every day, I’m all ears. 

PPS: I also have been toying with the idea of a newsletter for longer articles, guides and opinions that would get published to this site 6 weeks after newsletter subscribers get it. A $1 a month donation would get you access to the newsletter. With the conversion rate around 1% of readers opting to do this, I wouldn’t make a lot of money but it would help off-set the costs I spend on hosting. I’m thinking about it, not really sure if I will go through with it. We’ll see.

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