As mentioned earlier, I’ve added page spanning to the main trailers page, instead of just having the most recent followed by all the trailers on one page. Now you don’t have to wait 10-15 seconds for that large page to load and can browse more leisurely.

The “All Trailers” page will still be around for those who prefer that. I removed the Digg code from that page as during high Digg traffic time, load time for that particular page is pretty unbearable.

It looks like the next piece I would like to add is some sort of search box. I’m thinking of a simple search box that’ll search based on title and maybe description, and even provide suggested titles so you search will complete faster.

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been making a few changes to the front page for the last few days. First I started digging a couple of the HD Trailers to see if it’ll attract some more people to the site. Then thought, why not include a digg link on the preview page itself, so if people liked a particular HD Trailer, they can digg it:

Then I thought how cool it would be to have these diggs/ratings show up on the main page. For those who would usually skip over movie trailers because they’ve never heard of it, might actually decide to see it after noticing a high number of people digging a particular trailer. This led to the latest change:

There is some increased delay when loading the pages, due to the fact it’s contacting the Digg server to retrieve all the ratings in real time. I’m trying to see if there’s a way to cache it, but for now, the extra delay isn’t that significant in my opinion, but if you think it’s really bad, please let me know. I’ve been looking at the Digg scripts and there isn’t quite a easy way to do it yet.

Next thing I should do is probably support multiple pages of trailers given the fact that “All Trailers” page has over 230 trailers already and according to my stopwatch, takes over 10 seconds to load. The All Trailers page will still stick around, but for those who want to leisurely browse on quick loading pages, the multiple pages will definitely help.

I decided I needed to simplify the main page as the number of HD trailers have surpassed 200 and the main page is taking quite some time to load now. Therefore, I’m restricting it to 15 trailers (or 3 rows of trailers) on the main page, so it’ll load quickly. You can still choose to view all of them as I’ve made a separate index page for it: View All Trailers, which is also linked from the main page.

Hope this helps with the experience!

I’ve moved the blog over from DreamHost (krunk4ever.com) to 1&1 (hd-trailers.net). The migration actually wasn’t that bad. I don’t have shell (SSH) access on 1&1, so I was expecting it to take more time. I’m actually thinking about dropping DreamHost altogether and switching completely over to 1&1 and upgrade to a plan that does have shell access. I’m starting to get sick of hitting DreamHost’s CPU and memory caps.

Moving WordPress provided some guidance, but basically what I needed to do was copy over the WordPress files, copy over the database, fix up the configuration file, cross my fingers and hope everything works. It happened almost quite like that.

Instead of copying over files, I decided to switch over to the newest version of WordPress. Once again, I wished I had shell access, so a quick wget and tar -zxvf would’ve done everything for me, but instead I had to download the zip file, extract it, and upload each file separately, which took 10x as long. I copied over the wp-content data from my old site for the theme and attachments. I also modified the wp-config.php with the new database info.

Both servers had phpMyAdmin, so copying the database over was pretty simple. Creating a new database on 1&1 was rather surprisingly instantaneous. DreamHost usually took a few minutes. I exported the SQL from the old database and injected into the new one. Happened smoothly with no problems along the way.

Then came the part of crossing fingers and launching my site. It worked, but all links were redirected to my old site. I went into the admin control panel and updated the base URL for this blog. I also had to update the theme I was using since it defaulted to the classic one.

Browsing around, I noticed my attachments were still pointing to the old address. That was easily fixed, however I also had to go in and modify the GUID of the attachments in the database which were still pointing to the old blog.

Afterwards, the final thing was to update the .htaccess of the old location to redirect traffic to this site.

I did modify the theme a bit as well as the main page so the blog and the main HD-Trailers.net page would link to each other. That didn’t take too much work either.

A Hungarian blog decided to link to my HD-Trailers.net site for the Death Sentence trailer, causing a big spike in visitors. This ended up breaking my daily all time high of 114 visitors to 225. 170 of those visits were from within Hungary and 84 from Budapest:

I’m planning to move this blog over to HD-Trailers.net, but am trying to think of the easiest way to do so without breaking anything. Good thing is I don’t have any custom code on this blog. The database port is just my biggest concern, but hopefully that would be simple and painless.

The new URL will most likely be: http://www.hd-trailers.net/blog/

I’m also planning an RSS feed for the main page HD-Trailers.net page. Should be simple enough, right?

I have started a new site which displays the same aggregated data as this blog in a much nicer to use interface: HD-Trailers.net

Screenshot:

There might be a few broken links here and there, but that’s just because the aggregated data was bad in the 1st place. I’ve fixed a few already, but when this blog started, there were quite a few links I had to fix.

Tell me what you think and how it can improve.