During this process I’ve had to call on friends all over the place to Beta test for me so I knew where the bugs were.  Nobody can find the flaws faster than someone with fresh eyes.

My good buddy Bofe commented on my just-barely-better-than-craptastic load time on the site, so I’ve been engaged with speeding up my sites.  I find that my experiences with Joomla center around mastering one aspect at a time, so this time it’s optimization to reduce load time.

Right now, I’m using the 23-odd domains that I have to experiment with different caching techniques in Joomla so that I have a good basis of comparison.  The Extensions section on Joomla.org led me to a tool called PageCache 2.0.10 from JoomlaPerformance.com and the immediate results were good.  I saw, according to their measurements, auxillary page load times decrease to almost 1/5 what they were.

The problem was the index pages.  On one domain, RDL-USA.com, I saw page load time soar from 9 seconds uncached (high) to 17-19 seconds cached (outrageous).  Still haven’t figured this out yet.

So, after reading the usual “I know more than you ever will” banter on the Joomla forums, I found that I might have another issue: just watching the page load I saw that ads.mylogancounty.com stayed in the status bar in the bottom left of Firefox for quite a while.  When I unpublished the modules containing those calls to OpenX, the page load time dropped DRAMATICALLY.

So, if you’re out there, please- I’d love to hear about your experiences with managing a Joomla site with Cache enabled and banner management.  Thanks!

• RHSTeachers.com
• LCHSTeachers.com
  

These sites are coming on the success of my wife’s daily blog for her classroom which received great acclaim and success. I’m very excited to see this come together.

Both of these sites are free and sponsored by MyLoganCounty.com, which is right now in final revision.

MyLoganCounty.com will incorporate all of the following features, most of which are free!

1. User-Submitted Articles from the community and community groups
2. Commentable articles to spur discussion
3. Discussion Board (tentative, but it will launch. We’ll see how the masses do.)
4. Classifieds
5. Job Listings
6. Home Listings (may launch late, a pay service)
7. Community Calendar (HUGE! Can’t wait for this!)
8. Business and Organization Directory (one stop shop for finding everyone in the county with unlimited picture uploads!)

So, as you can see, the site is LOADED with features! I’m very excited about it, and I’ve already started selectively leaking news of it’s arrival.

RusselvilleDental.net (.com) is currently undergoing review (at the .com address) for final install.

Russellville Dental Lab, LLC (demo)

Pro Struck, a company with a new branch in this geographic region, is getting a new site from me. That will be prostruck.com . They will be using Joomla for content, Google Apps for email, and Google Analytics for stats (first combination with Joomla, but all early reports are that it works very well).

LoganCountyRepublicans.com underwent a MAJOR renovation recently. Be sure to check that out. More content is coming soon.

The Russellville Arts Council has talked to me about setting something up for them, so I’m hoping to get that knocked out this week.

I have proposed that the Logan County Tobacco and Heritage Festival needs an autonomous web presence seperate from the Logan County Chamber of Commerce, but that is taking a back seat until at least the ’08 Festival.

RussellvilleMethodist needs a facelift now that I am more comfortable with Joomla and designing for it, but it is functioning. Training members of the “web team” for this and LCRP is the biggest obstacle to overcome.

I am developing courseyblog.com and fullerblog.com in my spare time. Hopefully I’ll be able to have MORE spare time after I get done with some of these projects.

MyLoganCounty.com and ShopLoganCounty.com have also been relegated to “spare time” projects. I know what MyLoganCounty will be, and I know how to do it, but I don’t want to do it a little at a time – I want to go full board and get it done in one spurt. ShopLoganCounty.com will be a premium extension of MyLoganCounty.

Wish me luck.

Used Times New Roman to emphasize the whole news/portal feel. We’ll see. It’s simple enough.

Let me hear what you think!

MyLoganCounty.com