You know how it is. You started drafting out a design for fun and you end up falling in love with it so much that you just have to make it your own. This happens to me more than I’d like to admit, and there’s still a few things about this design that I don’t particularly care for, but it’ll do for now and I’ll update it as I see fit as I go forward. I’ll be tweaking the site for the next couple of days, but I opted to remove maintenance mode and re-open the floodgates. I don’t expect much traffic until the tutorials are restored, however, but do feel free to explore and let me know if you run into any bugs.

So far, I’ve managed to test the new design on Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3, Chrome and a few others. So far so good! The only issue is with IE6′s integration, and it should degrade semi-gracefully (i.e., no jQuery effects).

Registration has been opened as well for the first time in Steel Frog’s history. If you want, click on the little help button on the top left to register for an account and let me know how it goes.

Please note that all comments have been purged from the database for sanitization purposes. It does make the blog look bare, but it was deemed necessary to keep the database running clean this time around.

Update on compression and cache

On July 23rd, I heavily optimized the website, enabling several caching and compression algorithms. If you run into any strange issues with the cache, please get in touch. I’m making sure that the cache gets refreshed periodically when certain events are triggered, but if something is wrong, do let me know. I’ve also taken the time to compress images even further, reducing the front page’s size (at the time of writing) to less than 130KB. Booyah!

According to Firebug, I’ve reached an 86% efficiency rating. Yslow grades me at ‘B’. Not bad.