A Fresher Look

24 January, 2015 04:20PM ยท 2 minute read

The last site redesign was about a year ago when I moved from WordPress to Statamic and was based on the Statamic Denali Theme which was the only one available at the time. Over the past year I’ve hacked and twisted that theme beyond all recognition and looking back, it had become bloated. Hence I’ve decided it’s time to revamp the site and strip out the cruft.

The new site layout no longer includes voting since, with many thanks to fans of Pragmatic I now have more than enough topic suggestions to keep the show going beyond 100 episodes. I’ll be gradually covering them off over the course of the next year or so.

Also the membership portion and newsletter are on hold for a little while due to a busy time at work and they were slowing the site down considerably the way I needed to implement them due to Statamic restrictions at the time. Now Statamic have finally added a bunch of new membership features I will eventually roll them back in as time permits provided they don’t hinder performance.

In its new, leaner and meaner layout, despite now being hosted on a VPS with 1/4 the memory using spinning platters and not SSDs and 1/3rd the HDD space, the site is running 2-3x faster overall.

Digital Ocean has been great but now I’m trying out CloudShards and so far it’s handled peak load of a new episode of the podcast going up and standard week of other site traffic: So far so good.

I’ll be tweaking little details over the coming weeks but as always if you have any feedback please let me know via the feedback form.

Enjoy.