Faster, Better, Fluffy-er

If you have been paying attention to this site you´ll have noticed quite a few subtle changes in the last few weeks. More recently a big speed-up but there is a lot of cool new fluff as well...

I don´t normally spend much time adding "Fluff" to web sites - but with all the increased compatibility of the various web browsers and proofs of concept like facebook et al that show it works I thought a little bit would be fun and improve the overall user experience.

There are loads of libraries out there that make adding "fluff" (and some really user interface tid-bits) much easier and I elected to go with the jQuery library because I quite like it´s structure. I won´t get into the technical reasons why here but if you´re interested you can ask in the forum.

The upshot for you, the user, is some big improvements to the way the menus work, the photo gallery, and the speed of the web site.

I´ll leave it to you to discover the photo gallery and menu change yourself - but the speed upgrade I´m especially proud of. This I just completed yesterday and at first seems a bit counter-intuitive. How, after all, do you end up with a page that loads faster when you just finished adding a new Javascript library that increases the size of the page by About 60K - compression and caching is the answer.

I have added gzip compression and a bit of intuitive caching to all the code coming off the server (including the Javascript and the Style (CSS)) and cut the size of the Bosunsmate home page from well over 100K down to About 60K - which is really speeding things up (I hope you noticed!)

In any regard I hope you enjoy the changes and keep your eyes on the site - because I have a lot more "fluff" to add not that the library is in place!

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