As I stated in my previous post, I’ve been looking into some optimization options for my site. Things like page caching especially drew my attention, but then I realized something. If I step back to a design standpoint and think logically, I noticed a lot of unecessary things going on. Before I continue, I should mention I didn’t make any vast improvements on the slow API request issue, but I since converted my del.icio.us integration into a much easier solution: the rubilicious gem. It’s slightly faster and much cleaner. I tried going back to the flickr gem (since I’m running a frozen version of Rails now), but kept getting “Invalid API Key (Key has expired),” or something along those lines. Both of my developmental API keys for Flickr are, in fact, active. But it looks like I’m not the only one with this problem. Needless to say none of those solutions worked for me.
Back to what I was saying. Since the APIs bog down the site, are they really needed? Well, no, but that wasn’t an option. However, it isn’t needed on every page. I’d say some people read my posts in a feed reader. In that case, if they feel compelled to comment, they probably do a CTRL + click (or a mouse-wheel click) to open a new tab (assuming those who comment DO NOT use IE, which may or may not be accurate) and go directly to the entry. This is much faster for those people. I can see putting popular tags and categories in a common layout for convenience, but it boiled down to a design decision, and I simply didn’t want to. There’s a link to search available in the footer throughout, so that’s close enough.
Finally, I didn’t like the two column layout. So while I was motivated enough to make some adjustments to the code, as usual, I made some adjustments to the CSS. I like the open feel of an entry consuming a page. After all, aside from people like me, most visit sites to read/view content. That’s much easier to do when it’s the only thing drawing your attention. So, I’ve rolled out version 2 instead of starting over. It’s a little out of character, I know, but I’m proud of myself.