I made a few small changes and rewrote the calendar rendering to cut page rendering time by about 0.05s. The old calendar system made an SQL SELECT for every day in the calendar; the new system makes just one at the start to get all the days that have news posts on them. Between all of the changes I made, page rendering has gone from an average of 0.085 seconds to an average of 0.035 seconds, while using a bit less memory. This should make my hosting provider happier. A system to rebuild a set of static HTML pages would reduce load even more, but that’s a bit too complicated for me to handle myself. I’ll probably try to trim the site down even more before I add the quicklinks system, since that will add another SQL SELECT. Aside from quicklinks, I also plan on adding a Help or About page for the news section, explaining everything it does, along with a couple more small features. However, the news section is now mostly finished.
I changed the daily archive pages so that only days where I actually made posts get listed (which should make it a lot less cluttered), and post titles (if they exist) are given, which should make it easier to find something. I experimented with a calendar (like the one in the sidebar) but decided that that wouldn’t work as well. I’m going to keep working on the site and make another post later today, which should let me make sure the daily archives handle a day with 3 posts properly. I also made some changes to the editing system, but obviously I’m the only one who can tell.
A couple of small changes: I reorganized the stylesheet very slightly so IE should now use the hover effect on links (the underline goes away to indicate link hover), I removed the useless class="nb" stuff for the image links at the bottom of the sidebar (along with the corresponding CSS) since I can just use selectors to fix them, and I edited the little “external link” arrow (which IE users can’t see—sorry, I tried) so it should animate a little more smoothly (you can only really notice it on a white background though). Little tiny changes, trying to make the site just that little bit better. Of course, there’s a lot of big, obvious stuff I still have to work on. That gets saved for when homework is done.
