I’m aware that the site takes a while to load, and I know what the problem is.

It would seem that all of the cool feeds that I added (Twitter, LastFM, Picasa, etc) are the culprit.

I’m using a free program called SimplePie which takes RSS feeds and parses them into HTML (website language). It does a great job, better than Magpie RSS, which I was using before. The problem, it would seem, is when the website loads SimplePie, the cache folder gets loaded with the data from the different feeds.

This is good! This speeds up loading time for everyone except the first person to load the page.

The problem, is I can’t seem to figure out how to get all of the pages to use the same cache! This means every page has to load all of the feed data once it is accessed. Not good.

With that said, I put some time into working on it, but to no avail. I’ve made the refresh time longer, so feeds will be more likely to be out of date, but you’ll also be more likely to load the page quickly.

I’m going to continue on with the updating of the layout. You’ll notice that Photos and about represent the new change. The Blog is halfway there. The front page is, of course, finished.

About, Photos, and the front page all have slightly different layouts. This is because the design is, in a way, modular. Designing on a grid has allowed me to plan for content areas of various sizes. As the update progresses, you’ll see most pages with slightly divergent layouts.

Also, my logo is TOO HUGE.

As for me, there hasn’t been much going on in my life. Getting ready to move back to Athens and working on the Iridium Apparel website. It might not have been mentioned here, but I’m updating (content) for their site and will hopefully be redesigning it soon. Exciting stuff.

More to come, as always!
Jason