Dark Mode / Theming Consistency

Dark mode support has been added. It follows your browser's setting. The support has been added across the site. With the implementation, more of the site aligns with a consistent theme. Most of the changes are in Links on mobile and the menus and buttons for the Forum and Gallery.

Weather location code has been rewritten.  I am using lookup-only APIs and wrote a very compact UI. Overall, the code size for the previous Google Maps API is over 300 KB. My code is less than 15 KB. Smaller, faster, and easier to change. Session-based local caching and rate limiting on the queries are built-in for efficiency and performance. If you had previously set your location, no need to update it.

Air Quality Index has been added to the weather display, providing more information to help you plan your day.

Iconification, Design, and Weather

I've added the Font Awesome library to the site. This enables better icons throughout. New icons for logon, lock, news categories, settings, location, and icons on the menu buttons. This change also solves the issue where browsers may convert some symbols into emoticons. The menu received a redesign with the icon addition.

The weather system has received updates...

New graphing options: toggle between rain percentage and amount, wind speed and gusts, and humidity and dew point. The wind speed graph always shows speed and gusts, with one represented by a dotted line.

Enhanced radar: added image time using OCR on the browser to parse the radar time (10 images take about 1.5 seconds to parse), better cache-busting and sequence order assurance (using animated GIF loop and extracting the frames), speed control for animation, pause with hover over dots to switch images, pinch to zoom on touch screen devices, double-click and mouse drag to zoom with a mouse, cropped image for a cleaner look.

New loading code: optimized load efficiency for faster load, removed duplicate radar image load (originally to improve performance, but no longer needed).

Getting Just A Bit More

In my quest for performance... These are the top enhancements I've made recently:

1. New server: my host has KVM servers at a lower price than OpenVZ (what I had). In addition to saving money, I have increased memory, more storage, and a dedicated kernel (Open VZ shares kernels). More memory means better caching configurations, which equals faster sites.

2. Brotli with Cloudflare: I had used Brotli (better compression) on my site in the past. Once I moved to Cloudflare as a proxy, they only accepted gzip inbound (though they sent Brotli). Last year they added Brotli passthrough support. Now enabled here, it eliminates half of the compression steps before pages are delivered.

3. Redis usage increase: I changed default PHP sessions from files to Redis, reducing latency for some pages.

4. New weather data source: I moved to Open-Meteo. The data files are over 80% smaller, for faster loading of the weather forecast.

Researching these improvements, many ask "Why" if only to save a few milliseconds...
Small changes today are the building blocks for great achievement in the future.