DaveNet: Saturday, June 28, 1997; by Dave Winer.

Late June Home Page Changes

Here are some recent changes to the way the Scripting News page works...

• I no longer produce a special page for Netscape 2.0. Someone pointed out that the regular format now looks pretty good in Netscape 2.0, and there were broken features in the automatically rendered page. It was a noble effort, but I want to back away from maintaining two versions of the home page now. It was all automated, but it slowed down the rendering process, unacceptably, I decided. This may raise an issue for some people who preferred the low-bandwidth version.

• The header is now a GIF instead of being an HTML table. I made it "crazy" today so people would get the idea that it could change. If you have ideas and want to do a design, send me a pointer and I'll link it in for others to look at.

• I rebuilt the scripts that build the page so it's much faster for me to build the page. I now cache the rendered text for each day. Further optimizations will be possible by not processing macros for all the rendered text, just for the template. That will wait till next week. You can get the source for the current user.websites.home from the fat pages site.

• The template got a lot simpler. There was a lot of old junk floating around in there. I did a pass to take out the old stuff, and took out most of the macro calls that were just used for formatting static text and links.

Sat, Jun 28, 1997 at 9:35:10 AM by DW