Comments for "Site transformation update"

Things have really been stabilizing on Lottery Post, after a period of a 2-3 of weeks of constant changes.  The architectural changes to the web site are dramatic, and include code and concepts that I have been working on for about 6 months now.

I am happy and relieved that it appears those efforts have been successful, particularly with regard to improving the general performance of the site.  Pages that took close to a second to generate on the server are now taking a few hundredths of a second. 

And the improvements have only just begun.  I have certainly gotten over the biggest hurdle of implementing a completely new thread page -- the most complicated page on the site -- as well as new pages for posting new topics and replies, but there are many more pages to convert.  As each page is converted over to the new technology the performance of the entire web site is improved, as some of the strain of the older pages is lifted.

Transforming a page from the old technology (classic ASP code) to the new technology (ASP.NET 2.0 with Atlas technology) involves completely rebuilding the page from the ground up, so it does unfortunately take longer than I would like.  The positive aspect of it is that because I have to rebuild the entire page, it gives me an opportunity to implement changes to the page that I've intended to do for a while, but didn't previously have the opportunity to address.

Thus, every time a new page is converted, the performance of the site improves, and there are normally functional improvements as well.  Plus, with the pages rebuilt in ASP.NET, they become easier for me to change later on, as it is a much more capable and extensible programming language.

One of the things that I have been working on this week is the RSS feeds.  I'm not sure how many people have been taking advantage of the RSS feeds, but if this is the first time you've heard of "an RSS feed", then you owe it to yourself to find out about it.  Hmm..... I feel another blog post coming.  I think I'll save this topic for another post.