There's life in the old Fasthosts server yet

Fun weekend's wouldn't be complete without several hours tweaking fasthosts dedicated servers to improve client website performance. Thanks again to the region's Bespoke Coder for sharing time, skills and tips.

The fun menu included optimising .NET application pools, defragmenting the drives, going through the event logs, removing or disabling unnecessary services and resource hogs, installing or re-installing software to improve the mail-server, updating web-config files to cut out the .NET proxy problem so scripts could access the web-server faster, updating log file settings so as to not fill up the C:\ drive, and that sort of thing.

Now the original Callisti server performing with some gusto, given its modest technical specification. However, it won't stop the server upgrade plan...

The server is leased from Fasthosts but nearly all of the Matrix control panel and Matrix services are bypassed to help improve performance and control.

Optimising wedding photos - a special thanks

Callisti had been provided with a script from the region's Bespoke Coder to run on some of the content managed sites in the portfolio.

Comlongon Castle had taken care to update all their image descriptions (normally ALT tags) throughout the website - no mean feat given the volume of wedding photos the castle venue generates!

The site and database were then backed up and the script was applied. This cycles through all the images in the content folder, copies back-ups for each image e.g. thumb, medium and full-size, into a temporary folder, then renames the image using the description stored in the database, or failing that the image file-name. The new file-names are put back in the original directory and the database updated to account for the change in image URL.

Why? In this case, the original content management system would rename any image file-name during the upload process to a string of digits. This update means all the images now have a keyword relevant title and URL.