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We're Upgrading Servers, the Website, and Our Content

Posted on December 26, 2014

This is written for our more loyal, recurring readers (and you are all greatly appreciated!).

I posted a year ago that we'd have a massive mobile and front-end overhaul online in 2014. It's looking like I may be able to keep that promise. After a year of being tied-up in development hell, troubleshooting, bug fixing, and redesigns / innovation, we're approaching the end of the development cycle for our new website template. This new template will feature front-end upgrades, unseen structure updates, and will function significantly faster in loading than the present template. Similarly, the new site has spent the last few weeks getting a mobile facelift – we're trying to build a usable mobile version of the website.

I say “usable” because, as a user myself, I rarely prefer the mobile layout of a website to its desktop companion. I'd almost always rather fumble through with pinching and scaling than try to navigate an altered mobile layout. We're trying to fix that.

The new website also features a few extremely useful (and exciting) features, including a hardware specifications dictionary that properly defines all major hardware terms in a single place. If you spot something like “ROPs,” “TMUs,” or even just “CUDA cores” and want to learn more about it, we're making that easy. Navigation is key to the new design, as is information conveyance.

We have a few really cool and fun PC building software solutions in the works, too, but those won't be implemented until after the new site template is online.

Alongside the template upgrade is a server upgrade. The current server hardware isn't too exciting – I think we're on 4GB of ECC RAM right now, which is frankly mind-blowing compared to the 256MB we started on. The current CPU priority is mid-range on our virtual server, so we still have to fight other websites for CPU cycles during times of load. I'm still running the numbers, but we're planning to upgrade to more memory and higher CPU priority with the new site.

Finally, there's a lot of big content in the works. If you've read some of our heavier-hitting research and peer-reviewed pieces (like the SSD anatomy post), you'll be happy to hear we've got more content of that depth in the works. It's very difficult to write such detailed content on a regular basis – we strive for accuracy, which means several passes of peer review from engineers. That's a slow process since these people are volunteering their time freely to fact-check us, but it is something we've managed to streamline with recent connections in the industry.

I'll have a proper end-of-year post on the 31st, as I've done the last few years. This, quite honestly, was written just to get something online while I take a day off.

Whew.