What Was THAT About?

By -

Welcome to the new Slope of Hope. What’s so new about it? Looks the same doesn’t it? Well, yes, but it’s what’s going on under the surface that I’m talking about. And I offer to you Exhibit A (by way of reference, the old score was something like 28):

pagespeed

You see, for quite a few weeks now, we’ve been fighting all manner of trouble behind the scenes. It has taken a tremendous amount of time and expense to get here, but we’re finally here. I feel like an actor who has diligently appeared on stage every day and night, trying not to mention to the audience that an enormous grease fire was going on just behind the curtains. It’s been stressful.

Slope’s own success was the cause of these troubles. I had thought that simply paying for faster servers would do the trick, but it didn’t. We have been using a variety of testing sites to objectively measure Slope’s speed. There were many instances in which the home page was taking about 45 seconds to load, which is absolutely insane. Now it’s more like two to three seconds.

We’ve done three big changes: (1) we have totally changed host providers, and we’re much happier with the new one (2) we have fundamentally changed the underpinnings of the popular comments system (3) we have optimized the server software, particularly with respect to data caching. What it should all boil down to for you is a faster, more reliable experience on the site.

gemtrix

A particularly painful moment was only an hour before I was to get on a plane to go to Thailand. I was worried if the site would even be functional, but we managed to patch things together so that it could keep hobbling along. That’s all in the rearview mirror now, though. My hope at this point is to completely focus on what I enjoy most, which is creating new products and features and, of growing importance, improving the interface to those features so you have some vague awareness of the dozens and dozens of things you can do on the site.

The fact that you are reading this probably means you are on the site just fine, but just in case, I’ll mention one more time the importance of clearing out your cookies. I can’t tell you how many people have written me asking about their login troubles, and it’s the same answer ever time: cookies, cookies, cookies. Click here for the article in case you are having any login issues, and as a reminder, a Ctrl-F5 on your keyboard will clean up your browser nicely for the new site.