Skip to main content

Site Redesign

I was due for a site software update, so I decided to modify the site as a whole. My main goal was simplification and to improve on usability.  As I went through the visual-template code, I also attempted to improve execution speed by minimizing include files and removing unnecessary features.

  1. Minimize the website banner to remove wasted space (logo redesign as well).
  2. Remove unpopular items from the site such as the forums.
  3. Reorder the site tags, recent postings, and other navigation links to improve on ease of use.
  4. Lessen the use of colors on the site.
  5. Clean up the footer area.

I’ve noticed that the site seems to load faster in general. I suspect something like that XML parser for the forum was decreasing overall speed quite a bit.

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

ChatGPT is a new, and faster, way to do programming!

Currently ChatGPT is in a free “initial research preview” . One of its well known use cases at this point is generating software code. I’ve also just used it to write most of this article… Well, actually a future article about cleaning up SRT subtitle files of their metadata faster than I have been by hand with Notepad++ and its replace functionality. Update: I recorded a screencast of writing the SRT subtitle cleaner application loading and processing portion. I relied heavily on ChatGPT for code. It was a fun process! https://youtu.be/TkEW39OloUA ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a powerful language model that can assist developers in a variety of tasks, including natural language processing and text generation. One such task that ChatGPT can help with is creating an SRT cleaner program. SRT, or SubRip Subtitle, files are commonly used to add subtitles to video files. However, these files can become cluttered with unnecessary information, such as timing lines or blank spaces. To clean...
Read more

Theme error in 2010s Android App after AppCompat Migration

I plan on releasing a lot of my old work as GPL open source, but most of it has aged to the point that it no longer functions, or if it does work it’s running in compatibility mode. Basically it’s no longer best practices. Not a good way to start off any new public GPL projects, in my opinion. The current project I’m working on is an Android app that calculates star trails meant to help photographers get or avoid that in their night time photos. For now I’m going to skip some of the import process because I didn’t document it exactly. It’s been mostly trial and error as I poke around Android Studio post import. The Android Studio import process… Removing Admob Google Play code before the project would run at all. After removing dependencies, it kind of worked, but when running it in the emulator it shows a pop-up message saying that the app was developed for an old version of Android. Going through the process of updating code to match current best practices… I had the IDE convert the ...
Read more

Printing to file in Linux WINE

I noticed that this post has been sitting as a draft since 2011. At this point I have no idea if it’s useful or what I was even doing, but I might as well make it public in case someone can find it helpful! So I’ve been trying to get one of those PDF print drivers working in WINE without success. I then came upon a process that might work. When printing you need to select the checkbox “Print to file” that creates a .prn file. Just Linux things... I was using a program that only has printing facilities, but I want to export around 100 pages of text and images. Once you have the .prn (postscript) file, you can do any number of things to it. In my case I want the postscript file to be converted to HTML. I am also considering PDF format because that has more conversion options to eventually get me to HTML or plain text. sudo apt-get install cups-pdf Or it looks like that package might have changed to this… sudo apt-get install printer-driver-cups-pdf Where PDFs would be generated in /home/...
Read more