A new design

I have spent this weekend getting to know how to build my own template from the scratch and try to provide a better user experience on this blog. I think I have met my goal to an extent. The credit goes to blackout on reddit and hammering of its alternatives' servers.

Continuous improvement of blog to provide better user experience, faster page loads and sitemap by building blogger template from scratch.


I am also working on a sitemap to help my readers find other relevant stuff on this blog. I have to sift through all my posts yet to complete this sitemap. This is the first step. There will be a second sitemap to help navigate through non-SAP stuff on my blog.

If I can figure out a better way to provide relevant posts on the blog post itself, I will add that feature. I used to use nRelate, which is now discontinued. If you know of a service other than linkwithin, please leave a comment!

If you think your colleagues/followers/friends (usually the same) would like this blog, please mention us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google Plus! You don't want to do that? :-( Take this quiz to test your Basis knowledge and compare with your colleagues/followers/friends (usually the same :-) )

Update: CloudFlare
Honestly I don't know if CloudFlare will cache css, JavaScript and image files that are hosted on several different domains (I use Dropbox for storing text files and blogger uses bp.blogspot.com to store image files). It would be interesting to see how much this blog can gain from using CloudFlare.

I have updated the name server details on Aug 29th and CloudFlare has confirmed the NS transfer on the same day (pretty fast for a free service). I have used gtmetrix and pingdom scores to get an idea of the improvements.

Update2: My observations
Alright, so here are my observations from one day of use.

  1. CloudFlare is a superb free service (they have paid ones too, but I did not use them) if you are using it on self-hosted or average hosting. Not so useful if your blog is hosted on platforms such as blogger/blogspot, wordpress, tumblr etc.
  2. The external files (I have CSS and Javascript on Dropbox and blogger hosts images on bp.blogspot.com) are not cached and the domain lookups are inevitable.
  3. I was able to use HTTPS call to my blog, but it was not an end-to-end SSL, because I don't have an SSL on blogger.
  4. Before trying CloudFlare, sapnwnewbie.blogspot.com used to seamlessly redirect to sapnwnewbie.com. But now it adds an additional step, warning users that they are being redirected and needing to press an OK button.
  5. All the traffic is now pointing to be originating from the U.S. It used to be heavily diverse.
  6. There was no apparent performance gain. Obviously because Blogger and Dropbox are first-class platforms.

I have decided to stop using CloudFlare. No point in wasting their resources when Blogger does fine.

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