Craig in feed form

I changed the look of the website a little while back, as you may have noticed. It is quite a significant departure from the previous style and layout. The two main changes are the new colour scheme and the inclusion of a number of feeds on the index page.

Colour scheme

I was inspired to change to a much darker scheme having read an article on how the colours effect the energy required to display a website. Essentially, bright and light colours require more energy from your monitor.

Feeds

These feeds represent online content which I have created. Although in the case of recommended posts and bookmarks this creation might be considered a bit abstract. This was an idea I had a long while ago, and then not so long ago came across a way of quickly and crudely implementing it.

Up until today the feeds have been read, parse and output each time the page was called. This was causing significant delays in the page loading times. As of today a static file containing the parsed feeds is generated every 12 hours. The index page then calls on the static file when a request is made which means that no time is wasted on parsing the feed and preparing the output.

For those interested I’ve done this quite simply by writing taking a php file that was parsing the feeds and having it write the output to a static file. I then have a cron job run the php file at 9am and 9pm everyday:

0 9,21 * * * /usr/bin/php -q /PATH/generate_static_feeds.php > /dev/null

The last bit of that command “/dev/null” sends the output into the ether. Without it the server will e-mail the output of the script… which for some purposes can be rather useful.

In time I’ll be working on a more complex way of displaying the recommended posts, which will allow me to write a little note to go with each explaining why I have recommended them.