It's been mentioned elsewhere, but it's still worth mentioning more. I know the site has been slow as shit. For reasons beyond my understanding, these problems seem to be a lot more prevolent in Chrome. If you boot up IE11, thefpl.us loads like a dream. Please note I am not encouraging you to do such a thing, just mentioning it as a fallback option for the moment.
NOW THEN, THIS NEW SITE:The new site is being built in
Kirby, a flat-file PHP based CMS. What do those stupid words mean? The important part is that it doesn't have a database. The entire structure is spread out among very, very, very simple text files (written in
markdown built in a folder structure like /episodes/151/episode.txt - This gives a lot of advantages, but the major two are
speed and
security. thefpl.us has been hacked more times than you'd expect, and we've also had a fair share of hit & run assholes trying to sell shit on our comments section. The main reason for thefpl.us' speed problems is that Joomla is a bad piece of software, but pricks are reason #2.
This isn't just gonna be a matter of putting the same site on a more stable skeleton, either. I'm gonna be giving this thing a lot of different expandable features so the site is built around the content and not the other way around. I don't want to get too specific yet as some of this shit may or may not work, but I can say the plan is definitely a better website, in a number of ways.
I'll bring up the down side here though, which is that we may (probably?) be losing the comments archive in the move. The new site
will have a comments feature, but it won't be the same as the exiting comments feature, we'll be starting fresh. (Neither better or worse, really, just different) If it's possible to scrape the comments from the current site we may try that and make the archive accessible, but know that the comments might be gone. If you want to save fanart or screenshots of favorite comments, that might be a great idea now.
Site's currently running on a dev server I'm not ready to show anyone yet. When it gets a bit more mature I'll throw some links in here for an early peek. I'm excited.
Short term, if you're having troubles connecting, something other than Chrome will probably work better.
