What's Up, Dickyweed?

5 comments (closed), posted on september 11, 2005, tags: me, summer, work

Wow. Summer went by fast this year, eh? We spent most of our time at the pool, swimming and going down the water slides and jumping off the diving board. It was like being children again; the water was warm, the sun was out, and we were swallowing water and doing hand-stands and cannonballs and having races. It was more fun than I've had in a long time, and I'm truly going to miss it. Winter usually feels long enough without thinking about how much we miss the pool every weekend. Oh well. Next summer will be here before we know it.

Work has been hectic. Katia and I had a vacation planned to Seattle, but we had to cancel it due to a large project at work which I'm finally getting close to finishing now. A few weeks of late nights, but I've made it through and I'm not too much worse for the wear, other than the fact that I feel like I need a vacation more than ever. Hopefully we'll get to go somewhere soon.

I finished up my first Ruby on Rails project (which I will announce here soon), and I am absolutely smitten with the framework. I definitely plan to use it on the next thing I do, and hopefully get it happening at work as well.

Oh, and in case you're wondering, the title of this entry is heavily inspired by the book I'm reading. If you can guess what it is, you'll win a cookie.

What did you do with your summer?

Status Check

23 comments (closed), posted on july 6, 2005, tags: dev, me, site, summer

The design has gone over ridiculously well. In addition to the great feedback I've been getting from everyone, the new design has also been featured on CSSVault, CSS Thesis, CSS Import and Unmatched Style. I'm very happy with the outcome and I'm glad everyone likes it.

Over the past few days, I've been making modifications to the codebase (now at version 3.0.2) and I've reworked some of the primary classes so the site is now much faster to render. Load times for every section are much faster, including some of the ridiculously long tag-based archives (e.g. the "site" tag), which used to take nearly two seconds to render but which now take well under a quarter of a second. The speed boost is primarily due to a change in the way I handle Markdown processing for my content.

I used to keep everything in the database in pre-processed Markdown mode, but after many conversations with Gruber in the past I finally changed the system to keep two versions of all content: one unrendered, Markdown version and one rendered, XHTML version. While it seems strange to have two versions of everything, it's worth mentioning what John said to me: "disk space is cheap, CPU time is expensive." The total size of the database before this change was 5.1 megabytes, the total now is 7.2. A measly 2MB and my site renders nearly twice, if not three times as fast. Well worth the space. And, since I still have the Markdown version of content, I make changes to that instead of having to write any XHTML. When I post updates to the database, they're converted using Markdown and stored alongside their unrendered brethren.

When I rewrote the quick search feature for this version of the site, I simplified the Ajax component and cleaned up the code so it's now much easier to add functionality (e.g. you can now scroll down and up, left and right (except in IE) and across columns using your keyboard), and I have more in store. The next addition is something I've not seen anywhere, but it's really obvious. I'm also going to expand Ajax use to comments, which I meant to do a long time ago but haven't had a chance until now (and, since the Ajax code is so much cleaner now, it won't be a nightmare).

Aside from all of this, or unrelated, rather, is life outside the website. I started a new job about a month ago (yes, another new job—the second in 5 months), and it's going really well. It's nerve-wracking to move from job to job like that, but it was worth it in the end and I'm happy where I am now. Katia and I have also been spending a lot of time at the pool this summer, and I'm currently healing from a terrible sunburn I received last weekend. Hopefully it will be nearly gone by Saturday so I can go back to the pool. I think the swimming is helping my arm too, so that's a definite plus. I've also started going to the gym again, which feels really nice.