Website upgrade

I've taken on the part time duty of maintaining the website for our bicycle club and so far things have been working out pretty well, although it can be a time-pit if you let it suck you in. I've learned a few things along the way, like replacing the Java based menus with css (helped the initial home page load much faster for our user base). I also recently struggled with getting a PHP accelerator working (to speed up our events calendar). The hosting company that we use didn't "directly" support IonCube, but I was able to work around that and the performance boost has been pretty dramatic.

I've also been getting quite a bit of riding in, this passed weekend I logged 50+ miles, Tuesday ~32 miles and tonight probably another 30 miles (got to take advantage of the good weather when we get it).

Safe riding all.

Updating the Spinners website

Without a total redesign I've made the first change by incorporating CSS into the main menu, replacing the somewhat slow loading java applet menu code. You can compare the two, at least until I'm satisfied that there's no bugs in the new menu code.

Original: Spinners site with Java menu

New: Spinner site with CSS menu

I got the code for the CSS menus from http://e-lusion.com/design/menu/ which had several good examples of basic block menus. This worked well for my needs, as I didn't want to radically change the look/feel of the site. This allowed me to easily adapt the CSS menu into the existing website.

The next thing that I'm going to look into is the use of the ionCube loader to speed up the Spinners Event/Ride Calendar (PHP based), but this is going to require a change on the host server, which is shared. So this is going to be more difficult, since loading the ionCube loader is not under my control.