Last updated on October 7th, 2015 at 10:17 pm
More Skeptical Raptor website housekeeping
The very first thing I want to say is thank you to the whole bunch of you who clicked on the PayPal link on the left, and contributed to the running of this website. This may not be the most personal way to say thanks, I just didn’t want random emails ending up in your PayPal inbox.
I was trying to run this website all by myself, but I think I fell to the Dunning-Kruger curse and thought I could become an HTML5/PHP/Javascript expert by spending a few hours on Google. Yes, the irony was profound. I suddenly figured out that learning computer code is about as hard as learning epidemiology.
So, I hired someone to clean up the code, which caused lousy performance. My pages were loading in like 30 seconds, which 15 years ago would have been amazing. My IT guy (he’s a guy and he’s in IT, so there we go) had to look over like 15000 lines of code. He found the problem in like the 14,000th line, which is just my luck. Not that it matters but putting a “;” in the wrong place can be the death of a website.
So, it appears that pages now load in 1-5 seconds. Thanks IT guy.
He has some more code to clean up (I was sloppy). And we’ve got a boatload of re-directs to fix. He also removed a dangling piece of code that sometimes redirected the main page to a MySpace page. Of course, that begs the question of “who uses MySpace anymore?”
We’ll see if these fixes are actually permanent. I think an anti-vaccination shill has haunted my website.
With these fixes, I’m actually back to having fun writing here. The page loading problems made writing a 2000 word article tedious. Page loads cost me hours of writing time, and I was seriously ready to give up.
In some other news, Big Pharma still hasn’t sent me Shill Payments™ yet. If anyone knows who to speak to at Big Agra, Big Pharma, and Big Evolution, please tell me. I fell as though they’re using me.
So, if you have a chance, look at the left column, and you can contribute to running and maintenance of this blog with a simple PayPal click. Anything helps. I promise to remove it once the Shill Payments™ gold bars are shipped.
Please, no one who has contributed should do it again. Unless, of course, you received your Shill Payments™ gold bars. Then help out a fellow shill.
I feel like I just did one of those NPR contribution drives. “If we raise $10,000 in the next 30 minutes, Big Pharma will match the contribution.”
