You are here

Feminine beauty site makeover

This site has received a big makeover.  Here are some reasons why and an explanation of the changes.

The previous form of the site comprised of static/html pages, a content management system that ran the blog and a wiki using different software, reflecting how the site had developed over time.  This was unnecessarily complex, and the only way to do a single search that covered all three parts of the site was to use an external search engine.  Left intact, future expansion of the site would have made both its structure and management more complex.  Therefore, I decided to bring it all under the management of an industrial strength application framework, Drupal, and it has taken some work to do so.  But the work is worth it since the site now has an improved structural layout and more elaborate tagging, which makes a wiki hardly necessary to better organize the site’s contents.  The wiki section now only features an aesthetics part, not so much because of need but because it happens to be a good citation tool.  I also had to move the site to a new server to better handle the traffic since it had been suspended on numerous occasions for consuming a lot of server resources.

The urls have changed, but people accessing the old urls will automatically be forwarded to the new ones.  The old urls could have been retained, but the new urls are structurally better, often shorter and more meaningful.

All changes made to the site can now be tracked at http://www.femininebeauty.info/tracker (can be accessed by clicking on the “Recent activity” link in the right column).

A listing of recent comments is available at http://www.femininebeauty.info/comments/recent (link provided in right column).  This functionality is now much better since the latest comments are provided in their entirety.  Earlier, the reader had to go to the article to find what the latest comment on it is about, sometimes to find that it was of no interest, and sometimes having to do some navigating in addition to the initial click to get to the actual comment if the comment appeared on a page with a large number of images or was a response to an article with a large number of comments.

Previously, the home page of the site, i.e., http://www.femininebeauty.info, had introductory information and all commentable articles were posted at the blog.  Now, the introduction is provided on a separate page, http://www.femininebeauty.info/introduction.  The blog part of the previous site is now moved to the home page except for most of the risqué materials, which are moved to http://www.femininebeauty.info/blog.

The RSS feeds are now better.  For those who don’t know, subscribing to a site’s RSS feed(s) notifies one of the site’s updates without having to visit the site.  The main RSS feeds are http://www.femininebeauty.info/rss.xml (home page) and http://www.femininebeauty.info/blog/feed (risqué materials/blog).  Additionally, each tag/category label has an RSS feed associated with it.  Links to the respective RSS feeds can be found at the bottom of the home page, the blog entries listings pages, and pages featuring a list of all articles tagged with a given label.

The system presents multiple ways to view comments, most not very useful.  The default I have set is flat list-expanded, oldest comments first, and 150 comments per page.  At the time of this writing, the threaded viewing option is useless because the previous system didn’t have the ability to both reply to the article and/or graphically point out that one was replying to a specific comment in response to the article.

Some of the main pages have been updated; there are other self-evident changes, and I will be making more changes.

Some people had previously subscribed to be notified of follow-up comments on an article they had commented on.  This data has not been transferred yet.  In the future I will likely add functionality that allows people to subscribe to be notified of updates to a page/additions to a category of their choosing.

It may be that some links are broken because some files were not transferred to the new site location.  Please let me know about broken links.  Suggestions for improvement are welcome.

Categories: 

Comments

Site looks great.

Nice work.

Some people have been posting their comment twice, because their first comment didn’t appear right after they posted it. This is a caching issue with some web browsers; what happens is that the browser displays the originally accessed/previous/cached version of the page after the comment is posted. If this happens, the user should reload/refresh the page, and the new comment will display right away. I have left an explanatory note below the “save” or comment posting button.

A similar issue applies to frequently updated pages such as the “recent activity” and “recent comments” pages. Their content is set to be cached in the user’s browser for 2 hours after first access. In other words, let us say that a user accesses one of these pages, the page is updated a few minutes later, and the user goes to the same page less than 2 hours later; the user will not see the updates, but will see them if the page is reloaded or refreshed.

Hi, I'm glad you improved the behind-the-scenes of this site, However, I did question the site's existence. The new layout looks sort of like a domain squatter website. Even StumbleUpon had ranked this site as 'not-available'. I was kinda miffed thinking that this site had gone bye-bye. The site is easier to navigate though. Anyway, glad to see that this uber-bright lighthouse of truth still shines it's light upon the face of the deep.

Thanks and bye!

Well, there it is again! Thank you, Erik, for resurrecting your site again. I thought it was sad that it was just gone one day, and I think it is a very valuable and important one so I truly hope you feel inspired and committed to it.

Yay! Now we can go back to arguing!

I had a hell of a time getting here for a few days, go daddy go kept popping up but I get it now!!!

Glad to be back to arguing as other Emily says ;)

It does look great, just had time to go through and look at the changes. As Matthew said, thanks for shining light upon the faces of the deep. There's nothing else like this anywhere and I'm glad, so glad that it's back and running. Thank you.

Thankyou Erik for bringing back your site.it was a bit sad seeing "go daddy" page show up when typing in your site.I thought you had closed or sold it without telling any of your readers.

PS:everyone-this thread is about a year old.Maybe he has reupdated the site before?

Uh... Don't you think you are exaggerating when you call these women masculine or even unfeminine. I think that they are feminine for the most part with slight androgony to some features. And most are still attractive. They don't look like guys. Don't you think you're obsessing and exaggerating?

Femininity is so subjective. So many things can be debated. One can say rounder eyes with bigger eyelids are more feminine than smaller lid eyes while another may disagree. Or that a dome shaped forehead with a high hairline is the most feminine while another may see it as a large and mannish forehead with a look of male pattern baldness. Or people may argue that size of the face matters most while others feel shape (round vs. angular) is more telling. Or that the wider the cheeks the more feminine and others feel that robust cheeks are not. Everyone views things differently and likes different things.

Click here to post a new comment