The change!
Well, feel free to blast us..feel free to call us names..but we had to do this.
We had to change the overall look and feel of pluggd.in – not by choice, but we were forced to.
Here is why: traffic went up massively – the earlier theme (magazine style) wasn’t the most optimum (failed to scale up).
To share some numbers, each visit to homepage would translate into 7-8 DB requests (magazine/rich themes use whole lot of plugins) and surprisingly, we noticed that most of the users actually used to visit pluggd.in’s homepage first – and the result? A significant increase in CPU usage (even though this site runs on a dedicated server)..and..server crash..i.e. downtime (Infact, the saddest part is that I used to receive very frequent emails/tweets about the downtime)!
Caching solves the issue – but defeats the purpose of a magazine theme!
And that triggered us to change for good – to revert back to something that’s so damn minimalistic that we meet the prescribed yslow numbers.
The theme is inspired from TC, Wordpress, Derek and Brajeshwar (he was kind enough of share his theme).
Comments/opinions (will improve upon this theme in the coming days)?
And ofcourse, I will be sharing wordpress tweaks/hacks with the readers of this site (yeah! there are some cool stuff that you can do without using plugins).
About the author - Ashish Sinha is a Startup Mentor/Product Strategy Coach, and the founder/chief editor of pluGGd.in.
He has launched/managed couple of products (consumer as well as enterprise) in US and India, and now consults with startups/small businesses on their product/media strategy. He can be reached at: ashish (at) pluGGd.in [+91 98452 06443]
Server crashes coz of too many DB accesses?
Try memcached… Its “your best friend”
Caching doesnt help in magazine styled themes (earlier I was showing random articles from few selected categories..)
As they say…on the internet…speed is everything!
Too bad the theme SUCKS.
I think if u can make this theme a bit more vibrant using CSS, it should be a good change overall! Right now it looks kind of mashed up on the homepage, which sometimes puts visitors off !
I like the venturebeat.com style where I don’t have to open a link to read the article, the latest 10 blog posts should be fully visible when I open the home-page. Anyway I read through Google Reader, hope to get full articles atleast there.
The earlier one was way better. But I guess the economics of it has to work as well for you. “Recession hits Pluggd.in”. Not sure if you would like the community here to optimize things for you. I am not a techie but I am sure many of the blog’s fans would be happy to help find a technical solution for you to get back to the earlier layout.
That theme was awesome from a visitor pint ov view, though i myself had downtime issue once.
Lets hope this change make life simple.
I feel, this theme is much better. Add some more colors, if you will, and it will rock!!
Deeps
I like this simple theme better. The magazine style presentation was too overwhelming.
This one is better .
This one is better. And it doesn’t need more colors.
cheers
nilesh
I like the use of Whitespace. I am a Whitespace addict.
However I have a few issues with the current theme:
1. Looking at the amount of whitespace, the type used for the main text is not right. Did you try using a serif font for the main text? If you don’t like that, try fiddling around with the line-heights of the main text.
2. The alignments are off at way too many places that I would care to talk about. For instance, the top links (next to Custom Search).
- Adhip.
Thanks Adhip for your constructive feedback. By main text, do you mean the font-type/size for the post?
I’ll fix on the alignments (yeah..am aware of these misalignments).
Thanks everybody for your comments..will be fixing these very shortly.
Yes… Like, if you check out the websites like nytimes.com the fonts there enable reading content.
Try using something like Georgia… It will make the content much more readable. The rules of the web have changed. You no longer have to use sans-serif fonts for the main content on web today. The screens and the fonts have changed since the old rules of using sans-serif were written!
Though, I will continue reading pluggd.in via my RSS Reader!
Though it is minimalistic, you need to make it a bit more attractive for visitors!
Ashish!!
Change is good. But this change is not
Firstly agree to the server problem. But you can disable the plugins are find a simpler hack/css trick to do the job.
This theme is clean but content discovery is poor. You surely need to tweak it up.
Invest in a good designer. Hint
Things you can improve upon:
1. Content Discovery
2. Color Contrasts
3. Small Design elements that help in identification / navigation
4. Consistency of Fonts / Padding
Its quite a challenge to get them all perfect but there’s always that you can tend to.
Happy theming!