HalfEagle.com’s Blog

If you visit HalfEagle.com you should notice the page looks quite a bit different. I’ve just finished cleaning up a lot of the backend code associated with fetching the different blog feeds. While I was at it, I did a much needed redesign of the page.

Originally I was using sIFR to provide attractive headlines for each blog entry. Unfortunately I had to disable that because of the performance issues on the old server. Rather that turn it back on, I tried to build a good basis for an HTML only design of the page. Eventually, I’ll turn back on sIFR. Since the site itself is fast, fast, fast, a slight client side speed hit should be okay.

The best news of course is that the site is fast. There are now three different cache mechanisms to speed up the page… Caching of the source RSS feeds, a database cache, and an image cache. Flickr, Google News, and Delicious are still running off the old slow way, but the bulk of the slowdown has always been the blogs themselves.

I hope you like it! I’d love to hear your feedback on this version of the site design.

The next step for me (which I won’t get to for a week or so) is adding some features now that I have a robust backend.