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Well I told you that I would be doing a lot of streamlining on the blog and that is just exactly what I did. I did plenty of re-arranging and some deletes. Does it look different or is it even noticeable? I’m talking more changes since I wrote about the first set of changes I did. For the most part, if it doesn’t have anything to do with the Philippines, then it is no longer on the site. I even got rid of the Texas related posts, except the feature posts. There are a few exceptions, but very few. I did not do anything with any of the feature posts. Actually besides “My Stories” and “Recipes“, the only things that I remember that are not about the Philippines and still on the site are Being Green, I Went to a Party Mom and Marriage – It’s the Little Things that Count. All of those are in the category “Stories“. I just couldn’t bring myself to delete those because of the stories they tell.
In an attempt to try to make the page load faster for y’all, I even removed some things from the front page and put them in their own category or page. You may notice that the pictures and videos are no longer on the front page. That is the reason why, to hopefully let the page load faster. Please let me know if it is working. I hate for y’all to have to wait on this site to load, so I’m doing what I can and I hope it is enough.
The new photo album I just recently put on there was nice, but I was having trouble loading photos to it. At first it worked fine, but then it started taking longer to load and even then, half the time, the pictures would not even load. I just wasted 15 minutes waiting on them for nothing. The photos you will see on there now are ‘every‘ photo on the blog. It is not a nice gallery like the one I originally had, but that one I could not figure out. At this time they do not all have the proper names, there are some duplicates and some of them are pretty useless pictures from when I was putting just about everything on the site. I’ll be going through that and correcting all those things the best I can. For the photos on there now there are 2 controls for them. The top section is controlled by the page numbers at the top and the photos at the bottom have their own page control. I still haven’t figured out why they come up in 2 sections like that, but I may figure it out eventually. It doesn’t really matter I guess because it shows a lot of pictures.
The videos are in a little bit better way and I didn’t have to make any changes to those because they were working correctly. I wanted to say though that I deleted every video that was not associated with the Philippines in some shape or form. All the Photos and Videos are under the category title “A/V” (Audio/Visual) at the top of the front page. Let me know if you would rather have some photos and/or videos showing on the front page.
Speaking of the front page you probably noticed that there are now more categories across the top. There were only 5 or 6 before, but now there are 9. That’s the most I could fit in there with what my Category names without making a 2nd row and I didn’t want to do that. I had to put Photos and Videos under one (A/V) to make that fit. Before I had “Samar” and Calbayog City” under the category “Philippines” and it was making for a lengthy category. I thought it would be best to separate those out.
Since I brought up the subject of the category Philippines, I have also been thinking about just deleting it also. As it has been recently pointed out to me by several of you readers, it might just be best to concentrate in a particular area of the Philippines, namely Calbayog City and even all of Samar, instead of trying to keep up with all of the Philippines. Y’all might be right too because under the Philippine Hotel and Philippine Restaurant categories on the front page, I have nothing in them. There are quite a few links in the Philippine Websites category, but I’m not sure anyone uses it. There have already been discussions about the Philippine News and I suppose if someone wanted to know about Filipino leaders or Philippine Mythology, they could find much better sources on the internet than I have.
The last thing that I remember right now that I have been thinking of deleting is the “Info Websites“. Most of those do not have anything to do with Samar or Calbayog City and I’m not even sure if anyone is using it. I don’t think so. Now the Expat Websites I plan to keep even if their sites are not in Calbayog City or even on Samar. After all I expect to get a few readers from those websites as I hope they get readers from mine because the links are here.
That’s enough about the new design of the website for now. Basically I would like to now what y’all think about the changes and if it has made a change for the better in your loading time. I would also like to know if you would have a problem with the category “Philippines” no longer being here. Any problem with the “Info Websites” if it also disappeared, would you miss it?
Salamat, Y’all
