We’re Turning Back On One of the Caching Systems Today So The Blog Should Start Loading Much Faster
Now that we’re back from Chicago, I’m going to try to spend a few hours each day working on the blog upgrades we’re rolling out as part of Google’s new focus on mobile-friendly sites. With somewhere around 40% of the changes done on the backend, we’re reactivating the first of the cache tools today, combining it with the Cloudflare network to see if there are any conflicts. It will take awhile to build the static pages that get served but by this evening, on most devices you should start to see a significant reduction in page load times as the non-dynamic reproductions are distributed over the CDN. It might not be back up to full speed but then again, we could get lucky and it work right out the gate. In any event, if the server becomes unstable and the site goes down during the tests, that’s what is happening.
If the first round of speed enhancements work without too many problems, we will at some point try to switch over to larger blog feature images to improve the experience. Instead of what you see now when you visit the site, you’ll enjoy summary links like the one on this test page Aaron built (ignore the sidebars and such, this is just about the image size).
As always, updates will be posted on this page.
Update: As of Wednesday, June 3rd, 2015 at 6:00 p.m., CST a worldwide cache reset was sent out from both the server and the CDN. It will take 48 hours to reconstruct so you might experience some performance degradation during this period as the static pages build themselves.
Image Credit: hywards / Shutterstock
Reader Comments (8)
Comments are presented chronologically, with replies indented beneath the comments to which they respond.
Adam Yates
June 3, 2015
You probably already have a good tool set that you're developing with, but I've found the y-slow plugin/test app written by yahoo to be really helpful in diagnosing stages in development for high performance web sites. (http://yslow.org/). I've used it fairly extensively in developing our sites. One of the most notable differences was gzipping the text using mod_deflate. (not sure if y'all are using apache or what not..haven't looked.) Anyhow, check it out; it might help out!
Adam Yates
June 3, 2015
I'm not sure if this is the appropriate venue or not to post this (please don't unmoderate if it's not)- scaling down your images will save a ton of loading time for the pages vs. scaling them using HTML tags. See the attached screenshot for the particulars. Hope this helps!
Scott Thomas
June 3, 2015
I love reading these articles, but I'm old school so sometimes I prefer to print the article, then highlight as I'm reading so I can keep my highlighted article for future reference. Any suggestions on how to print only the text of these articles without all the images, ads, etc? Thanks for any thoughts.
Joshua Kennon
June 3, 2015
Replying to Scott Thomas
That's my work method for editing! When I write a long post, I am used to printing it, using a pen and highlighter to make notes for changing. It's easier for me to spot issues that way for some reason.
The current design doesn't have that built into it but the plan is to add a print.css functionality at some point in the future (I hope before the end of the year). In the meantime, you can get pretty close by using the "Reader" function built into browsers like Safari. When the results are displayed, print those and it will remove ads, sidebars, etc., leaving just the body of the post itself with a few other items.
Hope that helps until the solution is implemented.
Scott Thomas
June 3, 2015
Replying to Joshua Kennon
Thank you!
jhonanderson
June 4, 2015
right
joe pierson
June 4, 2015
I am curious, when you look into new businesses do you consider businesses like "5 hour energy" which can generate billions in revenues very quickly, or just businesses within your expertise?
kmica
June 7, 2015
Dear Joshua,
Sorry for barging in with the following question in an unrelated blog-post. What is your opinion on declining population sizes in most developed countries worldwide and its impact on economic figures? This is a question that has long concerned me regards investment choices, and I think is already of interest to you, especially given its long-term potential implications on long-term investing. Thanks, Karl