Everyday Ideas, QD Ideas

The Tech-Recipes redesign is finally in place. Tech-Recipes 2.0 is live!

I will post about our design considerations and our theme designer in a later blog post. For now, here are some before and after screenshots for comparison.

Old Version versus New Version:

Platform Transition

Early on in the process, we decided to transition from our php hybrid hacked-to-death platform to WordPress. The exuberant wordpress community, the ease of writing unique plugins (without hacking wordpress itself), and the large existing plugin library were reasons that we decided to go with WordPress. Most of our other blog projects were WordPress driven, so it has become comfortable territory to us.

My concerns around wordpress deal with speed and security. Q had generated an amazingly efficient static caching system for our old system. I am still unsure that we will be able to get the performance under WordPress as fine tuned. By its nature, our old hybrid platform had some security weaknesses, but Q effectively isolated it from overwhelming attacks. The huge popularity of WordPress makes it a big target for hackers. Hopefully, the large community of developers can stay ahead of them.

Comments

The forums are dead. Most of the popular forums threads have been roughly imported into the appropriate comment threads under the related tech-recipe. As successful as my buddy arn’s macrumors is with a forum based site, forums never really worked well for us. The noise to signal ratio was pretty high, and forum sign-ups are painful. By having comments directly related to a specific tutorial, hopefully we can keep the quality and focus of the discussion at a good level.

Disqus is an amazing comment system plugin. It makes commenting and thread-following much easier for the Tech-Recipes users. Moderation and spam-reduction are great benefits on the administration side as well. Plus, we keep control of the comment database so we can always move to another comment platform if we wish. Our biggest hiccup during the transition was importing our previous forum comments into disqus. As impressive is the disqus software, their customer support surpasses it. They immediately responded to our cries of help. Between the tweaks on both ends, comments were enabled within 24 hours.

New Features for TR2.0

We have always highlighted the current most popular tech-recipes. However, now on every page you will get a context-sensitive most popular list in the right-hand column. For example, while browsing a category, the top tutorials for that category will be listed. Or while browsing through an author’s articles, his/her top tutorials will be listed.

Q has developed a new advertising delivery system for us. I do not want to de-thunder his eventual release of the system. However, I will say this: It beautifully manages multiple ad campaigns through multiple categories. Since we pay our authors by percentage of ad revenue, it must also keep up with the author of the content as well. Q’s plugin does this as smooth as silk.

Q is also perfecting our media offloading system. Since our tutorials are including more and more images and video, it made sense to get our media off our main server.

The Future

Certainly, the rollout to 2.0 is not complete. We still need to wrap up more redirections for some 404s. I will be tweaking the theme for a long time to come. Speed, security, and our plugin systems above will continue to be tweaked and debugged. Still with all of this work on TR 2.0 to finish, it is fun to start brainstorming new features for TR 2.1.

Concurrently, we are also developing a couple of web applications for the medical industry, a medical iPhone application, and a fun flickr integration.

It is a great time to be part of QD Ideas.