Joped.com

Very minor change, moved /content/ to /joke/ for better SEO.  I think I screwed up a few moves back when I changed this and my traffic took a nose dive.

There is also a few minor bug fixes included

Most of the code on Linkped is pretty much in a prototype state.  Many of the tables are fairly unoptimized and are hard to work with right now.

So, I started a complete rewrite a last week.  However, a few days into the project I realized I am trying to do way too much at once.  The code requires a major overhaul and with my very busy schedule it could take a few months to get it to a respectable level.  I have now taken a step back and archived my work to start over in smaller chunks.  Although I “lost” a good week of coding, the code will be usable when I reach those areas.

I should start pushing some updates to the site in the next week or so, no new features will be introduced though.  Much of the work will be backend, but will fix a few quirks on the site.  For example, the buddy list system is slightly clunky.  Sometimes it doesn’t display the proper labels for users and defaults to their email address.  Its a rather annoying inconsistency.  This is going to be the first thing I tackle followed by user account system.

After I finish a few minor changes to Jokeped (Mostly SEO shit), I am going into a full development cycle on Linkped.  I totally rewrote Jokeped reducing the code base a ton and really optimizing the crap out of it.  It now has ultra high use of memcache to the point it can run without a database being present.  Keep in mind, it normally does have a database driving it.  The only time the database won’t be present is if the site was getting slammed or the server was having trouble.

I just spent the past month totally rewriting Jokeped.  I procrastinated it for a few months then started on accident.  I moved the code base from a generic framework that I put together over to CodeIgniter.  I started out my venture by laying out the new models.  I quickly realized I was going to be able to get rid of a lot of crap code.

I reduced the amount of code on the site by at least 40%.  Everything has been switched to a cleaner MVC.  Previously, the framework I threw together did things a little strange.  It was closer to what phpGW Nextgen was going to be.  Data layers have changed greatly since then.  I use memcache very heavly now.

When I get some time, I am going to test the site running without a database.  In the event the database goes down, I should be able to run 100% out of memcache.  Its about 90% of the way there, just need to tweak some error checking.

There are only a few new visual changes.  I cleaned up most of the forms using a generic form building system I am developing.  I am working to finish this system which I will open source at a later date.

There are tons of alignment fixes and fixed the flow of a few elements.  For example, voting is much cleaner now with a single AJAX request when posting a vote.  As sad as it sounds, I finally got off my ass and made it so you can vote without javascript.

There are no more tables in the HTML, and I have cleaned up the CSS like you wouldn’t belive.  Although its no even close to perfect, its unbelievably nicer then before.  I am working on reducing the number of images I am serving on the site.  All the forms are using a generic image set, rather then a custom background for each page.

The other big change is SEO links.  PJ has taught me a lot about SEO and helped me clean some of the crap up.  I think I am starting to understand why my traffic on jokeped.com started to take a dive after I released the new interface.  I have much work to do on SEO, however this is a huge step in the right direction.

Anyway, go check out the new version and contact me if you need any help or find any bugs.