Tweaking

Tweaking is usually a part I often do for some given reason. Currently I am focussing on the end of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). As I have been looking around, I have noticed a couple of things that really don't add up much. This is in comparison with the original concept of thesoundofreason.net or evanderheide.demon.nl if you will. As I have noticed is that the original 2 domains had a pagerank of 3. While currently the pagerank of reasonexperts is set to 1.

At some point it makes sense that it has a very low pagerank at this point. evanderheide.demon.nl had a lifetime of 11 years, while thesoundofreason.net was alive for 2 years straight. So having a domain running for 1 year, and having a pagerank of 1 makes sense. However, it could be improved here at some point. And using a proper SEO strategy makes sense to cover the basis of a good pagerank.

First of all I have a set of keywords I will be most likely focus on. These keywords range from reason to tutorials to some effects in the general sense. At some point there are some keywords where the site reasonexperts.com is ranking pretty well. Even while they are not the primary keywords people would search for, but at least there is some form of search volume around those areas.

This is one of the main reasons why I had to change the concept of the original 'windows 8 lookalike' page to something more static. As it is right now. As in look and feel it will be less attractive, however... eventually I can start working on those as soon as the keywords have installed proper on the google index.

As the keywords are mostly there, and there is still some parts which could be added later on, another side aspect is page load times. And personally there is a lot that could be improved over time with this one.

Facebook is a killer loader regarding to load times

First I am getting rid of the facebook like buttons. It just fucking baffles me that an average like button takes more then a second to load up... If people would like the page, they would probably share it themselves on facebook. Simply said... I will replace these facebook stuff with custom buttons in stead since it does not make sense.

Soundcloud load times

Soundcloud is starting to become a big mess at this point. One thing I personally don't get is why there are 3 different methods to embed a soundcloud post with. Second, I don't get it why there are crossdomain scripting errors when ever the newly formed HTML 5 plugin loads up. And last, I don't get it why this thing 'freezes' up the page from rendering from time to time. Maybe the last bit is a firefox issue... But at least I am experiencing troubles with it.

So... bottom line with soundcloud on the frontpage... it may be removed as well (since I barely get any plays on those things anyways).

It might be that I am going to replace the soundcloud play feature with a custom made feature on the frontpage eventually. At least it would make the load times much better this way.

MySQL Query Hell

With the initial kernel setup, I thought it would be nice to throw all sorts of MySQL queries towards the database server to get all sorts of information to present them. Eventually most of this was done on a custom box (so I could do whatever the fuck I wanted to do with it). Since Reasonexperts is moved towards a hosting company, there is an additional problem next to having limited diskspace: it isn't a dedicated box...

To improve the load times, I am currently trying to analyze what type of MySQL queries are running from the webserver. Most of them are pretty darn fast. However limiting them with lesser queries means that the render times will be reduced. There is a lot of overhead being generated by "counting" items. Even while these items are usually fixed (for instance on category levels). Therefor I have been replacing one part of code with a new piece of code that would only count these items once... and each time the Content Management System makes changes to the pages, the counter will auto reset itself and start the whole counting process over again,

This reduces the amount of queries with 34 queries in one go... There, that is effective ;)

Speeding things up makes the user visit faster, thus people might like it more this way... thus it makes sense to put some focus on this issue as well (even while it is just milliseconds work, that doesn't matter, every millisecond counts in my world).

Tweaking the Template

I was personally never aware that IE9 started to mess things up bigtime with the current template. There was one main issue that basically screwed things up big time. An A HREF (HTML method for putting links around an image, text or whatever) made the images turn into images with borders. I am aware of this issue, since IE is an incompliant mess too... Therefor I added a simple piece to the CSS file to get rid of it all:

* {border:0px}

And done...

Next to this minor flaw, I have been setting up a wider template style. Some of the older images I used on TSOR (thesoundofreason.net if you will) were made on a resolution of 640px something.. The currently template only holds images of 600px wide (thanx to some paddings). Because this made some articles unreadable I had to do something about this. I could resize all the images etc. However, I was already having in mind (read the december update on Reasonexperts.com) to change the template with a wider size.

Anyways, enough talk for now... Happy easter! Ow wait.. its december... ah fuck it...