Category Archives: Site News

Please Check This Site in Your Phone!

A quick request, if I may: If you have a web-capable cell phone, would you please try to view this blog in it and let me know how it appears? I’m testing some plugins that should optimize the page for desktop, low-end mobile, and high-end mobile devices.

Please look at the main page and at least one post, then leave a comment below (still on the phone if you can) with the following:

  • What phone are you using? (RAZR, iPhone, etc. Specific model if you know it)
  • Can you load the site at all? (If not, what error do you get?)
  • Does it look like..
    1. The desktop version of the site (red background, lightning banner, full sidebar, complete posts on main page)
    2. A bare-bones page (plain background, mostly text, headlines only on main page, “Powered by WordPress. WordPress Mobile Edition” listed at the bottom of the page)
    3. A sleeker-looking list (grayish background, each post headline in a white rectangle, calendar image next to each headline, main page has headlines that expand to excerpts, dark red banner across top, “Powered by WordPress with WPtouch” listed in footer)
  • Are you using the built-in web browser, or something you installed (Opera Mini, for example)?
  • Did anything not work?

If you can’t post a comment, please try one of the following:

  • Bring up the site on your computer to leave the comment.
  • Send me a Twitter direct message to @SpeedForceOrg.
  • Email me at speedforce – [at] – pobox – [dot] – com.

I’m mainly trying to make sure that the detection code is working right, since I’ve got 3 different plugins (WPTouch, WordPress Mobile Edition and WP Super Cache) working together to manage it.

Thanks in advance!

We’re Baaack!

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I apologize to those who’ve tried to visit the site this weekend and couldn’t see it. Apparently when I upgraded one of my plugins (WP Super-Cache, which normally improves performance on the site), it tried to enable a feature on the server that it didn’t have permission to turn on. Whenever it tried to load a page from the cache, it would run into the permissions problem and show a “500 Internal Server Error” page.

Of course, since I was always logged in when I looked at the site, it never tried to load the page from the cache, so I never saw the error. I even made a few posts.

Reminder to self: When updating plugins, always test the site both while logged in and while not logged in!

Technical details: The .htaccess file in the wp-content/cache folder didn’t have permission to turn on expiration (the error in Apache’s logs was “ExpiresActive not allowed here”). Solution: add “AllowOverride Indexes” to the folder’s area in the server configuration.

Light Blogging Week

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Even with Final Crisis coming out this week, it’s going to have to be a light one for blogging. Deadlines at work, so I may be staying late, plus I’m sick. (Great combination, huh?)

If I have time I’ll try to finish one of several half-done posts I’ve been working on. And I’ll check the usual news sites in the evening, though I doubt there will be much in the way of huge Flash news this week.

Speed Force Wins Project Fanboy Award

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The Project Fanboy Award for Website ExcellenceI just found out that Speed Force won the October 2008 Project Fanboy Award! (That explains the traffic I was getting from them last week!)

I remember the first ever website award I got was for the “Site of the Week” award from what was then called Jonah Weiland’s Comic Book Resources. A lot of fan sites would give out awards back in the late 1990s, and then it sort of fell out of fashion. It’s cool that there are sites still doing it — and it’s cool to have actually been honored by one!

Thanks to whoever nominated Speed Force for the award, and thanks to the Project Fanboy staff!

Three Months of Speed Force

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Some administrivia today.

1. As of Monday, it’s been three months since I launched this blog. I have no idea what the typical lifetime for a comics-related blog is, but I can say I’ve kept this up far more regularly than I expected, with 162 posts in 94 days — an average of 1.7 posts per day! — and readers have made nearly 350 comments!

It’s also taking a lot more time than I expected, which has kept me away from other projects. (In particular, I’d planned a major update for the Alternative Browser Alliance this summer, which has become more urgent with the announcement and first beta of Google’s Chrome web browser.) I may be scaling back a little on Speed Force soon, but I’ll still aim for several posts a week.

2. I finally got around to replacing the banner at the top of the page. I didn’t want to stick with the theme’s default, since “train station” doesn’t really say “speedster,” and I was never really satisfied with the fractal “lightning.” (Besides, the smallest I could get that image without making it look really nasty was a whopping 50 KB.)

Still, I’m a web developer, not a graphic designer or an artist. Give me the graphics and I’ll build the HTML and CSS to turn them into a web page, but original art? It would make XKCD look like George Pérez. So instead of trying to draw something, I looked for photos of actual lightning on Flickr. I adapted “Lightning Crashes” by ~Prescott under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic license. The banner can be re-used and/or modified under the same terms.

3. After a struggle for the spot at Comic Blog Elite with Collected Editions, we’ve both been superseded by a number of high-profile blogs that have joined, including Once Upon a Geek, The Absorbascon and 4thLetter. Speed Force has been holding steady around #12 lately.

4. I’ve dropped the Recent Visitors/Viewers boxes from MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog. They add a lot to the download time, especially on certain browsers *cough* IE *cough* that wait until they’re loaded before displaying the main section of the page.