Why is my web site so sloooooooooow?

I apologize for how slow this web site has been lately.  I don’t visit it myself too often when I am not actively working on wp-SwimTeam so I was somewhat oblivious to it.  My sites are hosted with GoDaddy and I’ve never really had an issue with their shared hosting service.  It is cheap, easy to administer, and for the low volume traffic I tend to get, more than adequate.

I called GoDaddy this morning to see why my sites was loading so slowly – I am seeing page load times of 30-40 seconds which is just plain silly.  It looks like another web site that I happen to be sharing the “shared” server with is consuming all of the resources.  GoDaddy is going to monitor it and see what is up.  I expect it will remain slow for at least a few days.  Hopefully they’ll figure out what it is and do something about it but they did tell me that if the other site isn’t violating their TOS, there isn’t much I can do about it.  They also suggested I look into a WordPress caching plugin.  I don’t have near the volume of data nor traffic to warrant a caching plugin but if the situation persists, I’ll look into it.

Bleh.  Even on a shared server there ought to be some expectation of “reasonable” performance.  I will continue to monitor the performance and see what I can do about it.

A new project?

Recently I have been working on a new Swim Team related project which at some point I will likely integrate into wp-SwimTeam but for now, it is a standalone application.  Pretty regularly I receive e-mail from people who want to post their meet results online in some form or fashion.  Most of the time these results come from Hy-tek in the form of a ZIP file or a CL2 file.

Generating or posting a static web page with some results on it is pretty straight forward and most swim software can do this in some form or another.  Storing the results in a database and presenting them as part of a web site isn’t something readily available as near as I can tell.  It would be nice to be able to upload a season’s worth of results and allow swimmers and parents to review their times and see the trends.  This is basically what I am working on.

At this point I can import a SDIF meet results file and extract the meet data from it.  I have some other infrastructure complete as well and will begin working on extracting and processing all of the result records in the next day or two.

I’ve based this project on two external PHP libraries.  I am using  the 2.x thread of phpHtmlLib, which I also use for wp-SwimTeam and ADODB.  This is my first time using ADODB and so far, there haven’t been any issues.  I decided to use it because I needed a database abstraction layer and phpHtmlLib has a ADODB data source widget which makes it very easy to present data to a user.

Calendar-Plus renamed to Enhanced Calendar

I just received the approval from the WordPress plugin repository for Enhanced-Calendar.  The WordPress plugin I previously called Calendar-Plus will now be known as Enhanced-Calendar.  Once I get the code all checked in and the proper structure, it should be available from the plugin repository.  Hopefully that will happen in a day or two.

Need to rename Calendar-Plus

When I first created Calendar-Plus I had hoped it was a short lived project that would either get rolled into the Calendar plugin or deprecated by a new release. Unfortunately neither has happened and it continues to live on. Because I didn’t expect it to last long, I never put it into the WordPress plugin repository.  I probably should have done that.

There is now a plugin in the repository called Calendar-Plus which results in a name conflict and the automatic upgrade system thinks mine is out of date.  I should have put my code in the repository but I didn’t so I can’t think of a good way to resolve this other than to change the name and put the code into the repository.

So that is what I plan to do. But I am not sure what to call it.

  1. Calendar-Enhanced?
  2. Enhanced-Calendar?
  3. Calendar-MW?
  4. Calendar-Plus-Plus?

I am leaning toward #2 as it is close to the description I used when I wrote it.