I made the sidebar 30 pixels wider by taking away space from the content. The blog area is still wide at 778 pixels, so it doesn’t hurt anything. This makes a big difference because the sidebar was too wide before. You can give your categories longer names without the names wrapping, and I added the count for each one in parenthesis next to it, thanks to wp_list_categories with the argument, show_count=1 in WordPress MU.
I’m taking advantage of the extra space by clarifying things. Instead of “Search Here” and “Search All,” the search engines say “Search This Blog” and “Search All Blogs.” Instead of “Entries feed” we have “Entries RSS Feed.” Instead of “157 Spams” it says “157 Spam Comments.”
The text in the header, sidebar, and content areas have more padding. It looks better and is easier on the eyes, with a bit of white space between the paragraphs and the green border.
Ads appear on posts 1, 2, and 3 on each page, instead of 1, 5, and 10. This should make more money as it puts them center stage. Money is good because it lets me keep Thripp.com running. The second ad has a new design with a dark background like the header.
I cleaned up my HTML; Thripp.com is completely valid now, as are all the blogs by default. This doesn’t stop you from creating malformed HTML in your blog posts or comments, however.
I gave my own blog a facelift. The thumbnails in the gallery and for the random photos in the header are nice and big now. Some time I’ll have to let Thripp.com members customize their blog headers. WordPress MU has an API for that I hear.
Printable pages have bigger titles and better margins. I took the ads off them too (they never printed but were just for display).
Thripp.com and its blogs are now about 30% faster. I centralized the JavaScript and CSS files under http://thripp.com instead of each blog, so your browser can cache those when you browse different blogs on the network. Also I consolidated the JavaScript scripts down to 2 files from 4, gzipped them, and did the same for the CSS, going from 4 files to 1. Fewer HTTP requests means faster pages, and we saved about 60KB with the compression. All HTML is already compressed, but I pushed it further by removing blank lines and tabs from the source code. As always, Thripp.com checks the HTTP headers your browser sends to see if accept-encoding: gzip is there. If it isn’t, you get uncompressed files, maintaining backward-compatibility with old browsers.
<pressRelease> These small but incremental improvements represent my continuing dedication to Thripp.com and its users, browser and access compatibility, and standards adherence, firmly establishing the network as an unrestricted resource for all.</pressRelease>
Enjoy!
