Technical Improvements

Instead of working on recipes or cocktail ingredients, I took the time and made some improvements to my site. It's faster and better than before.

I've had some issues with my blog, which annoyed me for quite some time. This week I finally began fixing them. First, the Meticlous Mixing caption looked weird when displayed on a mobile device, so I improved it. It scales down better and hopefully is still readable. Nevertheless, I plan further improvements.

The tags were also a nightmare. Tagging has become messy since I started, so I reorganized my tags and right now I'm trying to find a proper description for all tags, as well as a nice picture. While I was at it, I re-designed the topics section. It's now split into two, By Category and By Ingredient. Since I have a lot of posts now, it would have been messy to put everything onto just one page.

I added a feature, which I find quite useful: reading time. At the top of each article it the average reading time is displayed, so you can decide whether it's worth your time to read it all. At the same time, I decided to put a short summary at the top, like you can see here. As my next step I want to re-edit my old posts and add the summary—as well as other things—to make them easier to read.

Another big improvement I'm working on is down-sizing my pictures. I have made them quite small, but I found out there is still a good amount of file size I can chop off. Eventually, I will re-do all my previous images to make the articles load faster.

And while I'm talking about faster loading, I want to say that I could improve the initial loading times for my site a bit. I'm still figuring out if I can reduce it even further, but that takes time.

There were other small changes, but a noteworthy one is, that I got rid of my comment function. I have only gotten one comment since I started this blog. I feel that nobody really uses comments anymore and if you want to voice your opinion, there is always Twitter where you can yell at me.

Pete Barmeister

Pete is a German hobby mixologist always trying to find new ways to mess around with alcohol. When not researching articles he's always on the lookout for new things to drink.

Germany