Well, I've been meaning to post about this all day, but it's been hectic and I didn't have internet connection for the majority of it. Regardless, I have some intense site maintenance that I'm going to be performing tonight around 11:59 PM EST. As such, the site will be unavailable for around 15 to 30 minutes.
These changes won't be readily apparent and as a matter of fact, we may experience a few hiccups after they're rolled out. Not to bore you with the details, but I rewrote the entire backend of the site in order to enable me to provide new functionality that wouldn't have worked quite right otherwise.
In short, the way we managed game data wasn't quite right and it presented a constant challenge whenever I tried to integrate information about them into other facets of the site (which on a game site is a bit of a problem). By changing the fundamental structure of the game data, it will be much easier for me to begin exploring ways to link the blogs, collection, and other social aspects into the game database and the site at large.
I did include one piece of visual candy that I hope you like, and in general, pages should load quicker because the newly rewritten code is much more efficient. Sorry there's not something flashier to show this time, but I aim to deliver some very interesting and interactive components that are tailored to the community atmosphere of the site in the near future.
Thanks for your patience!
P.S. - If you do encounter any issues at all, please PM me the details and the time it happened (in EST) and I'll get it resolved as quickly as I can.
I think that adding tags to blogs could be cool. Users could search the site and find blogs easier. Is the reformatting a precursor to that? Or are there other plans in mind? I was just thinking today that I haven't seen any updates to the site in awhile. heh
Well, we're back and it took longer than anticipated. *crosses fingers* hopefully we don't have any major problems.
Excuse me, Mr. DiMola, but every time I post, the website sends back a message saying degrading things about my mother. I think it's a glitch, because it should be saying degrading things about your mother, right?
lol
The bar is mooooving!!!
Keep up the great work Nick!
Great work!
Only thing I've noticed is that this morning, the site feel like it's running just a tad bit slower than usual, but that's it.
There does seem to be some sort of small issue. I just put in a stopgap measure that should help improve performance, but I'll be looking into a more permanent solution.
Yeah, it's really slow to load pages on Safari now.
I like the moving bar, it's really helpful instead of scrolling back to the top.
So, I've managed to fix a number of bugs, but they're all unrelated to the general slowness of the site. I'm not quite sure what the issue is still, but I'm running diagnostics and hope to have some definitive answers soon.
Again, thank you for everyone's patience, I deeply apologize for the issues.
Alright, I did some more work to alleviate some of the slowness. Still not where I want it to be yet, but I think we're headed in the right direction.
Ultimately, it's looking like I'm going to need to upgrade the database server because the version we're currently using is fairly out of date. The latest releases offer numerous performance enhancements, many of which are directly related to the problem I'm seeing.
Please let me know if it's just unbearably slow for you guys. I know it's not perfect still, but I think it should be at least usable now.
Happy to report that Firefox and IE are zippy again. =) Safari is a lot better for me, too. Not zippy though. Thanks Nick!
Excellent! Thanks for the status report, hopefully we can get that back up to zippy speeds 
The loading speed has improved since last night. I thought it was my internet connection at first, but much improved speed.
Great, glad to hear it's running better!
After much stress and hard work, I think I've gotten the site back in tip-top shape. Absolutely everything should be zipping about at this point. The front page seems to be loading pretty close to instantly for me, which is a big improvement over the near 30 seconds it was taking before.
Anyway, it's 2:30AM and I need to get some sleep. I need to be up for work in 3.5 hours and if I'm lucky neither of my boys will wake up before then...
