Connor Wilson » Blog Archive » What the Future Holds Here

What the Future Holds Here

Posted on March 10th in Site Development — One Comment so far. Got something to say?

With the recent downtime, it totally killed a couple of things that had me writing pretty much twice a day. The feed subscriber rate was around 22-25 for the last couple of days before the now admittedly avoidable downtime, and that took a major blow. It’s a lot easier to write when you know that someone is actually gong to read it, or even glance at it for that matter- it’s the though that counts, right? Another thing I had been trying to build up, and keep it at a level were the normal page views/visits stats. I don’t get a lot of hits here, but it was definitely rising, and was around 60/100/60 per day until the 4th of March when the Internal Server Error reared its head. The load times had been coming down a little too, but they sky rocketed right after I got everything back. Fortunately now I’m using a cache system and things are looking way up. Anymore 40-50 second load times on my end and I’ll be so fast out of DreamHost it won’t even be funny.

So with all that said, now we’re on to the design end of things. I’ve been very busy lately with different clients, but I’m taking the weekend now to work on a new design for here. I’m moving in a new, more simplified direction. I’m not a fan of being too simple, but with minimal images (or none) I want to still have a great looking design. This current one has been subject to mixed reviews, and I can’t really put any credit to either side because I pretty much hate everything I design for myself. Sometimes I just need to trust the first feeling of, “This looks pretty good” and not let those second thoughts get to me. I’m sure I won’t be using the K2 theme as a base again, even though I love the added functionality of it, for AJAX comments, added integration for the UltimateTagWarrior plugin, and other nifty AJAX browsing features.

As far as what I’ll be writing about, as soon as I can get a good code hilighter plugin for WordPress that doesn’t get totally butchered by the WYSIWYG editor, I’m going to doing some tutorials or hands on articles on various things, like PHP/MySQL, JavaScript/AJAX, XHTML/CSS, etc… I’m also starting the journey to learn Ruby on Rails. I’ve got InstantRails set up for local developing, but getting the DreamHost domain with Ruby setup seems pretty hard, and hopefully that won’t hold back my first Ruby app. I don’t know what it is yet, but I’m thinking about doing a tutorial site CMS because I told Adam at TechTuts that by the time they’re done their next version (and I can’t say who or what is doing it), I’ll redo it for him in Ruby the next month

So after a couple of insignificant days of no posts, you can sure I’ll be putting things into full swing. Having all of next week off will help