This post was published 9 years, 11 months ago. Due to the rapidly evolving world of technology, some material it contains may no longer be applicable.
Hi all, we have some exciting announcements to make today about some changes which we think will vastly improve the experience for our readers here on our site.
We’ve been very busy putting all this into place which is the reason for our slightly more sparse news coverage of late and the delay in our post-I/O and I/O extended coverage (which we will have up very soon!).
So, let’s get started:
1. Putting The Green In Little Green Dude
We here at Little Green Dude feel we all have a duty to be ensure that our impact on the world is responsible and sustainable. The web industry uses a pretty enormous amount of power and while we make only a very tiny contribution to that as a whole, we wanted to do our part to help minimise the effect this has on the environment.
It is with that in mind that we are proud to announce that Little Green Dude has now moved over to servers which are powered 100% by wind energy. Now the Little Green Dude is green in more ways than one.
2. More SPEEEED!
Not only is our site now greener, we’ve made it faster too! No one likes to wait and as Google themselves say “the web should be fast”.
Along with the change in hosting, we’ve made a load of tweaks to the site and the way it runs. As a result of all of this, page load times across the site are now on average just a 1/3 of what they were before the changes.
The speed is far more consistent than before too and so there should be less of a difference in the load times between periods of peak traffic and during the quieter hours.
3. Increased Security
We always want our readers to feel safe and secure, and so we have also now enabled support for SSL encrypted connections to the site with HTTPS. This means that you can securely browse Little Green Dude in total privacy without any fear of your communications being read or hijacked in transit.
This is something not many blogs or news sites offer at this stage and is a level of security that is traditionally often only provided by sites carrying out secure transactions like banks and online shops handling payment. However, the demand for security on the web is increasing and we want to give the best protection for our readers.
HTTPS communications are currently not forced on by default but should now be accessible for most people if you request them (by accessing with https:// instead of http://). We shall be considering making the site HTTPS-only in the near future once we are sure that the certificate is fully recognised and accepted across the board – we wouldn’t want to prevent anyone from accessing the site!
4. MaterialYOLO
Greener, faster and safer not enough for you? Well, it wasn’t for us and so we’re making it prettier too!
In just a week from now the site will be getting a complete visual makeover which will be heavily based around Google’s increasingly popular material design language. Soon you’ll be able to #PraiseDuarte while you read your latest news and tips. This is something we are confident you are going to love.
Starting today, we shall be teasing the launch of this redesigned site by posting one image a day to social media for the next week. In each one we shall “turn on” another of the devices in the image above. This will be done in order of display size (smallest to largest) giving you increasingly detailed previews of various pages on the site. On the final day we will activate the new look.
5. No More Mandatory Login For Shop
Until now you needed to login in order to browse our merchandise and accessory store, something which we know was a pain for many users and put some off using the store at all.
It was required until now only due to a weird bug with our previous web host which prevented us from serving the shop correctly to unauthenticated users. With our new wind-powered hosting, this is no longer the case.
Happily then we have now removed this requirement. Now there are no unnecessary hoops to jump through in order to browse through the cool Little Green Dude swag. With some luck the T-shirts will look a lot better on you than they do on the Little Green Dude himself!
TL;DR
Our site is now faster, safer, easier to use and more stable than ever before and soon it will be more beautiful too! We always strive to improve and hope you enjoy the changes we are making. As ever we welcome any feedback you may have for us about the changes.
Thank you for supporting the site and helping us continue to grow and improve,
- The Little Green Dude team
