48 Hour Marathon to a Better Blog: Behind the Scenes

Notice any difference in our blog lately? Doesn’t it feel cleaner and faster? It can also be accessed from your mobile devices. This is because, we spent two days last week improving our blog and converting it into a better experience for you!

A few weeks back we noticed that our readers were having trouble with the interface and experience of the blog. Some of them felt a little impatient with how long the blog took to load. For us just being able to serve content was not enough. We wanted to make it perfect, with blazing fast delivery and a highly comfortable reading experience. So, a couple of us got together and decided that it is time to give it a fresh feel. We did a complete overhaul of the code behind the blog and recreated the theme in a newer version of the framework, all within a marathon of 48 hours!

The marathon

We formed a team of four people. Two of us managed the servers, while the rest concentrated on improving the theme.

Our first task was to find out bottlenecks in the speed of serving the site. We ended up finding the culprit in the place we least expected — in the theme layer. This is what happens with developers – they keep searching in all the wrong places. Once we had zeroed in on the issue, fixing it was no easy task.

The team spent two nearly-sleepless nights in ironing out all the bugs and refreshing the blog’s infrastructure from the ground up.

Let us take you through a guided tour of what new to expect from this blog!

WIIFY – What’s in it for you?

Read from any device

Hail the power of responsiveness! The previous iteration of our blog was readable only on large screens. We had been planning to provide support for all handheld devices for some time. And it is live now! Try any device, any screen size, and you get to read the blog from everywhere in a clean layout. We brushed it up endlessly to ensure you have that perfect reading experience from any device.

We have hidden the less used items from mobile views so that your mobile experience remains as clean as possible. We have improved the typography, added cleaner, smoother and more readable fonts. The texts look beautiful on small screens as well as large screens! There have been numerous other design changes in margins, padding, syntax highlighting etc with things that make that subtle differences in enhancing the user experience on the blog.

Get delivered. Don’t wait

We have moved our blog to a highly reliable and strong infrastructure. Our new server has been tuned to our wits end to ensure one simple thing: speed! From the performance perspective, this new blog is visibly faster than the previous one.

After the marathon

Everybody had a peaceful sleep. We prepared for a ritualistic victory dance for having cured the blog of its otherwise unnoticed ailments.

Let us take this opportunity to tell you that we sincerely adore our readers. We enjoyed every second of the marathon because we wanted to provide a better experience on our blog! And, we are eager to hear back from you about what you think of this new experience.

The old blog served us for a reasonable number of years. It taught us a number of things. The first lesson among which was: a blog should remain updated to meet the latest standards. New standards and stricter benchmarks have evolved within this period. We ensured our blog not just meets those expectations, but also excels!

But this is not all. We have bigger plans for this blog. Watch out for it!