Success!

Regular and observant readers will have noticed my blogroll has gone through a few iterations in recent months. My original dynamic one stopped working with the latest versions of WordPress, so I’ve been forced to use a simple static one for the last few weeks. Multiple people left me comments and emails saying how much they liked the old dynamic blogroll, so I spent a bunch of time looking for a good replacement. Unfortunately nothing out there had the performance and the features that I needed.

Luckily, I’m both a software developer and a masochist. I also love my readers. So I took some free time over the holidays to teach myself PHP and WordPress internals (definite masochistic appeal there) and wrote my own. The result can be seen to the right (desktop) or bottom of the page (mobile). This should still give zippy page response times while picking up new posts to display in an hour or two. It also adds some nice features like post snippets and the ability to drop sites that haven’t posted for many months. If anyone spots problems with it or has suggestions for improvements then please let me know via a comment or email.

After wrestling with code and weird bugs for the last few days, I now feel a little bit like this lady. I’ve beaten the software into submission and stand triumphantly above it. Sadly the original source for this image appears to have been less successful and is now a dormant site.

Author: paltego

See the 'about' page if you really want to know about me.

14 thoughts on “Success!”

  1. Hi Paltego

    Very quick message before this window closes – I’m getting extraordinarily slow loading times again now. 10 mins to load the site, another 20 to get to this comments box. Just like it was before you cancelled the dynamic thingie.

    Maybe it’s just me, but it’s so hard to comment I think you might not even get messages from others in the same situation (I’ve always been very stubborn, as my SO has frequently pointed out).

    All the best

    S

    1. That’s really weird. I’ve tried it on multiple browsers and devices (desktop, tablet, phone) and not seen issues. I’ve also run site speedtests from US and Europe that said it loaded in about 1 sec. I even tried a few proxy servers so I could browse it from different parts of the world, and it was all OK. Comments from others seem to indicate they’re not seeing an issue either. I’m a bit stumped how to debug this.

      Can you try again and let me know if the issue persists? Possibly you got unlucky with an unrelated issue from the hosting service or network? It seems unlikely, but I guess possible. If the issue persists would you mind sharing what browser you’re using?

      -paltego

      1. Thanks Paltego

        Ah, seems to be getting better now. But it comes and goes – didn’t work earlier today. It’s a WordPress thing, as I seem to have problems with other such blogs too. I use Firefox, for what it’s worth (very good for saving photos, as it remembers the folder you last saved to for each different site). I’ll try checking it’s all up to date.

        If it’s just me, no worries. I have a complicated set-up anyway, as I use a VPN (because I am paranoid).

        New blog looks good when it loads – and it’s sending traffic to my blog so clearly most people don’t have a problem!

        All the best

        S

        1. Definitely odd. I tested on Firefox, and it’s a pretty common browser, so I doubt it can be that. It has been pretty flawless for me so far, and nobody else seems to have an issue (or nobody else has told me), so I’m kind of stumped as to what else I can do. Google also gives me it’s average download time per page, so I’ll keep an eye out for any regression there (it tends to take a few days to reflect changes).

          If it gets better or worse, or changing something alters the behavior, then do let me know. It’s also possible somebody else will have an issue, and more data will always help try to figure it out.

          -paltego

  2. You are a coder and a gentleman. I’ve really missed the great round-up your dynamic blogroll provided. Thank you for all the work and effort you put into the new one.

    I’m getting very fast loading times with the new blogroll, unlike Servitor. Maybe there’s a difference between browsers?

  3. Yay! So happy this has returned. And the page loads very quickly for me. Thank you for your hard work on this and hope you’re having a great New Year.

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