Blog

Just a quick update on a few of the things I’ve been working on recently:

• A new user interface – the old Calcatraz interface has two main pages: the home page with a single calculation entry box, and the main calculation page which shows a history of calculations and other information. One thing I found was that the transition from the home page to the more cluttered calculation page was confusing to users. As a result I’ve been developing a new user interface which has a single screen (which is sort of half-way between the two old pages). This hides less commonly used features and removes the ‘surprise’ element which used to arise when a user was sent to the second page. Hopefully this will make the calculator more user-friendly and consistent to use. It also has the added benefit of reducing the amount of code and effort from that required to maintain two separate pages.
• A static blog. As a small startup, time is a precious commodity. I can’t really justify the time cost of maintaining an up-to-date wordpress installation. To solve the problem once and for all I”m creating some code which copies each html page produced by the blog. The result is a static html version of the blog. It has a number of benefits. First is that security problems are virtually eliminated as the only thing that will be placed on the webserver is static html. The second is that, as static html, pages will load more quickly than interpreted code. This will provide users with a better user experience. The main downside is that I will have to disable comments. However, this is a trade-off I’m willing to make as this site is mainly informational. I may look at reintroducing comments in some other form at a later time.
• General optimisations. One of my main aims for the calculator is that it should be fast. To this end I’ve been implementing a number of optimisations. For example I’ve modified my build process to minify javascript and css (that is, remove unnecessary comments and characters, to reduce size and therefore load time). This will be applied to the live site as soon as I finish my changes to the user interface and perform a site update.
• Core algorithm updates. I’ve been making a number of changes to the core algorithms to provide results more quickly. I hope to be able to share these details at some point in the future.

So while there hasn’t been much in the way of observable changes to the site, there has been a lot going on in the background. When I finish up these loose ends then I’ll update the live site. I hope you like the improvements.