Yes, this is still Quantisan.com. In case anyone is visiting and noticed
the different design. I've made some major changes to the website over
the weekend for both aesthetic and technical reasons.
- Professionally designed. The previous theme was something that I
hacked together over a weekend. It's actually pretty bad under the
hood as I had only learned PHP scripting to write that theme. This
new theme is a minor tweak over a professional framework. It enables
more flexibility to the page layout. Expect some major changes to
the front page in the weeks to come as this personal blog transforms
into a company site.
- Reduced computing resource hog. I disabled a number of Wordpress
plugin modules as the theme has already taken care of things like
search engine optimisation.
- Optimised page loading time. The code for the new design is also
optimised for faster page load times with built-in optimisation of
javascript and css file loading.
- Geographically distributed content delivery network. As forex is
a global endeavour, the readers to this blog is quite geographically
diverse. While the site is hosted in the U.S., I want to ensure the
readers from Germany and India (8% of my readers) have a smooth
browsing experience too. The use of a CDN to mirror contents around
the world makes this possible.
- Bad traffic filtering. A significant traffic on the web is due
to software crawlers. Some of them post spam comments on my blog or
copy my copyrighted materials. I added a server-side security
control service to block all those unwanted traffic. This increases
security and reduces unnecessary server load.
You might have noticed that aside from point #1, which is purely
aesthetic, everything else is done to improve page load time for readers
to this blog. The result is that the new loading time is down to about
4.0 seconds. Whereas the old site took around 8 seconds to load. You
might think this cost a fortune. But it still costs less than most small
websites out there. The old site cost me \$30 per year to run,
including everything from domain name registration to web hosting. The
new total is still only up to \$70 per year. The key to the savings is
that I made use of a free network enhancement service
(cloudflare.com) and exploited my remote server and network
optimisation knowledge acquired from the long nights of administering a
remote trading server. Technology is cheap nowadays. The real values
are in the ability to deliver on that technology to bring about even
greater return. This is what drives everything I do at Quantisan
Systems.