The first in a series in which we take a look into the workings of our mutual enterprise – h2g2.com.

You may have spotted here and there throughout my postings on site mentions of the upcoming new system. But what is it that's upcoming?

Well, to try and answer the questions you've not yet asked, we're bringing you the return of the View From The Towers, a (hopefully frequent) series of articles letting you know what we're all up to behind the scenes. And we're going to start off with what Tech have been up to.

For a while now we've been running with Pliny as the main skin for h2g2, it may not be the main skin that the community use, but it's close. It is however the skin that visitors to the site see, and the number of visitors we have greatly outweighs the number of registered users. Because of this, it's been very important for us to make sure that Pliny was stable enough to handle all that traffic and looked okay to. How often have you gone to a website, taken one look at it, and then started to wonder exactly how out of date the content is purely because of how out of date the site looked? If you're like me, it's quite a lot.

However, we've known all along that Pliny wasn't going to be able to be the main skin forever. It's a bit too integrated with the old code we got from the BBC, and there's a lot of styling and scripting in there to work specifically with the way that the BBC have their servers set up. In short, it's not ideal. We've also known that to fully rebuild everything from the ground up is not really something we can do quickly in our spare time. I built something similar a few years ago now and it took a three man team six months to build being paid 9 to 5. So we've been working in a nice modular way as a compromise.

We've taken the front end of Pliny and thrown most of it away. We've kept all the back end stuff, the database hooks and processing stuff, but we've dumped all the styling and scripting, and layout code. Once we were rid of that, we were able to start building what you see as h2g2 from the ground up, making sure that the work we do now will be usable by the rebuild of the back end that we have planned. We've started with a whole new skin called Eddie. It's very similar to the old Plain skin in that it has no styling at all. It lays the site out a bit, but that's all. On top of that we created a new Pliny skin, Pliny the Younger as it were. This Pliny is fully html5 compliant and totally adaptive. In other words, it shrinks nicely for tablets and mobile phones.

Once we had the base for this, we then started rewriting every single page one at a time to remove all extraneous code and optimise what was left. While writing this, the front page in Pliny the Elder totals 1.4MB of data and takes 4.87 seconds to download and fully display, using the Cloudflare content delivery network. The new front page in Pliny the Younger totals 1.3MB and takes 2.94 seconds to download and fully display from a test server with no delivery network or caching, in fact the page itself starts displaying at 1.51 seconds. Which means we've shaved off almost two fifths of the download time and it's still to go onto the delivery network which should make it even faster. We've managed to do this by getting rid of a lot of the stuff that whilst was needed for Pliny the Elder, is no longer needed for Pliny the Younger.

So design, layout and technically, Pliny the Younger is much, much better.

What about usability?

While we've been going through each and every page rebuilding them from scratch we've had the opportunity to look into and fix a lot of the bugs. Before anyone gets too excited, we've not fixed them all. Yet. For example, I'm afraid that drop downs don't work in Pliny the Younger and not being able to click to the last post of an Announcement still doesn't work yet. However, we've made the forum structure a lot more user friendly, by making it a lot more like the Ripley skins. When you look at your list of conversations now, you can unsubscribe from there, you no longer need to go into each thread and do it. You can also click to see the last unread post, yes folks, the biggest gripe with Pliny the Elder by a long way has been fixed. And believe me, it makes a huge difference. When you're in a forum now, you also get a summary of the posts alongside, and a list of the other threads in that forum, just as you do in the advanced/frames mode of the older skins.



We've also redesigned the front page. We spent a fair while looking at the analytics, seeing whereabouts people clicked, and deciding how to change the layout to better suit the needs of those using it. I won't tell you what it looks like, because that will spoil the surprise, but overall the site is looking and feeling a lot smoother and slicker.

We've had the test system hooked into the live database for about a month now, and I have to admit that each time I go back to the live system to check something I can't help but notice how much better Pliny the Younger is. We've not quite finished it yet, but it's getting very close and all the volunteers are able to go and use it and feedback. And so far all the feedback has been very positive. I hope it's not long before we can release it, and I hope that when we do you'll give it a go and let us know what you think.

Pastey

08.04.13 Front Page

Back Issue Page