New look, for now

All,

As you can see, there is a new look in place on the site. Clearly it is a work in progress, but I did not want to keep the site down any longer, and the other template was inviting a bunch of ne'er-do-wells to try and hack in.

The goals here were to use a much more efficient template for the site overall, to help deal with the load time issues reported by some, and to do a bit of back-end upgrading so that I can do extra caching of content (again with load times in mind). I will be tweaking the look-and-feel over the next few days, but if you have specific input please feel free to chime in.

I am also looking for some "dana" in the form of a logo for the site. If you feel creatively inclined, please post something here and we'll take a vote. If you take this challenge, I am looking for something around 320x100px.

Finally, while this bit of work should help with performance somewhat, I am still contemplating the hosting thing to see if we can get a better bang for the buck elsewhere. But that is for another day.

All,

I have been experimenting with alternate hosting and have found something (a) cheaper, and (b) dramatically faster for our little site. So sometime this weekend, between hockey and more hockey, I will be moving the domain to the new host. In order to do that I will need to take the existing site down so I can do a backup of the database without new changes coming in. I am not sure exactly when that will happen, but when it does you will get an "offline" message for a while. The migration will be complete when the site is...uh, no longer offline. I'll try and do some server voodoo to get you redirected to the new site even while the DNS updates worldwide.

The short version: faster, coming soon.

If you are reading this, then you are accessing the site at the new server. I hope you notice a substantial performance improvement.

But also note your URL. If you are seeing "awakenetwork.org" in the URL, then your DNS is already pointing at the new site so you need to do nothing else. But if you see an IP address in your browser (starting with 75.98) then you are being forcibly redirected here from the old site because your DNS is not yet updated. Do not be alarmed, it will resolve itself over the next several hours.

Enjoy, and if you see any hiccups as a result of the move, please don't hesitate to contact me or Chris.

I'll just share this observation of this new template we are using (aside from its oh-so-zen-like simplicity). The old template was annoying me in the sense that, when I was reading topic threads and got to the bottom, I would have to scroll all the way back up to the top to click on "Recent Topics" again, to get a fresh view of what I still have not read. In this new template, the top navigation bar is pinned, so the "Discuss" menu item, which is linked to "Recent Topics", is always just there.

Nice.

This is extremely nice, Tom, a great improvement in both speed and layout.

Congrats!

I have to be honest -- I kind of like the really simple look we have right now.