Ben Locke

Moving from Windows to Linux brought with it a whole heap of benefits as far as this site’s performance and stability is concerned. It also brought with it the need for me to be more disciplined in my naming conventions, … Read more

The site continues to perform really well on the new server. If anything, it’s surprised me with just how well it’s performing. There have been no errors due to lack of server resources (or any other reason for that matter), … Read more

I’ve made the site live on the new server. It’s possible some people are still being routed to the old server and are receiving an IIS page on the old server (where I’ve completely deactivated the site), but over the … Read more

I’m writing this from a new server – a different one to the public website. I have set up a duplicate of the whole website on with a new host in a bid to resolve the lack of server resources … Read more

My original site was written almost entirely in ASP. There are some large remnants of that in this new site, namely the species list and the entire gallery code. As a result, this new site is a mashup of PHP … Read more

Last night I made the decision to make use of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to alleviate stress on my site’s server. My server is based in Silicon Valley, San Jose, California, therefore all requests made to my domain name … Read more

I’m still in the process of optimising the site as much as possible in order to minimise resource usage on the server and make page delivery as fast as I can. This afternoon I used lossless compression on all of … Read more

The site has so far been well-received by visitors who have given feedback, but it’s been fairly temperamental with regard to its page loading speeds. There are a whole number of reasons for this, some of which I’m still investigating. … Read more

I’ve just fixed a problem that was causing certain photos to be cropped on mobile devices when used in portrait view. Anything with an aspect ratio that wasn’t in a landscape format was liable to be cropped. In particular, square … Read more