68 Classifieds Blog

5 Apps to speed up your website

While doing the redesign for 68 Classifieds site I found lots of useful tools that helped me speed up the site. Some of these tools are so great I felt the need to share them.

PHP Speedy

PHP Speedy is a script that you can install on your web server to automatically speed up the download time of your web pages. PHP Speedy automatically joins together all the appropriate files and compressed them, greatly reducing the load time of the page. This does take a little work to get it setup properly but I seen a big improvement.
» Visit PHP Speedy

Smush It

Image optimization is an art that not many people master. There are many good image editing tools that allow us to get the best visual result for a certain file size but “under the hood” a lot more optimization can be done.

Smushit.com is a service that goes beyond the limitations of Photoshop, Fireworks & Co. It uses image format specific non-lossy image optimization tools to squeeze the last bytes out of your images - without changing their look or visual quality. You’ll get a report of how many bytes you can save by optimizing your images and all the changed images as a single zip for download.

Saving bytes has never been so easy - you point us in the right direction, and we’ll do the rest for you. A ZIP archive with optimized images will be generated for you.
» Visit Smush It

Clean CSS

This is a css compression tool that will take a style sheet and compress it into an almost unreadable compressed form. If you do use this always keep an uncompressed version of the file in case you want to make changes later.
» Visit Clean CSS

YSlow

YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on the rules for high performance web sites. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the popular Firebug web development tool.
» Visit YSlow

Firebug

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. This extension plus the web developer tool bar are two that I use on a daily bases..
» Visit Firebug

Around the web - Great articles from Mike-N-Tosh

One of the 68 Classifieds moderators “Mike-N-Tosh” has recently started a blog on his site and has some excellent tips and tutorials for working with 68 Classifieds. Mike is not only a moderator on the forums but also has created some mods and templates which you can find on Classified Mods. Here is some of the posts he already has:

• How I Reduced Most of My Abandoned Listings
• Add an RSS Feed to the Seller Store
• Using the RSS Feed
• 68 Classifieds Basic Structure for Design Part 2
• 68 Classifieds Basic Structure for Design Part 1

He also has a module review and I am sure more great posts are in the works. This is a site worth checking out and will hopefully give you some great tips and ideas to better enhance your site.

Customer Area Changes

This weekend I spent some time changing our customers area to hopefully better serve you. We have used a separate ticket system for the past few years now and we really like the system but we seem to always get a few customers that do not receive our replies to their tickets. I imagine this is because the email reply is going to their spam box or just not being delivered.

So now when you login to the customer area it will show you a list of all open tickets and a new “My Tickets” link to show past tickets you have submitted. The goal with this is #1 to make it easier to read and reply to your tickets, and #2 to have a history that you can easily scan through and find old tickets.

Another new change is on the first page after logging is a list of all your downloads. This should help you quickly locate the product you are trying to download and prevent you have to make numerous clicks to get to them.

As always if you can think of something to make the customer area more user friendly please do not hesitate to let us know.

Welcome to the brand new 68 Classifieds

Our main site here has been way over due for a face lift and we are now proud to unveil our new design. The site you see now is the work of a lot of sleepless nights and the help from some great friends and customers. The design work was done by James Paden from Xemion.com. If you haven’t visited his site before then I recommend visiting and subscribing to his blog. He has lots of great articles and not to mention the web designer directory is built upon 68 Classifieds. James is a great guy and has more design and business knowledge than anyone I have ever had the pleasure of working with.

Some changes we have made for the new site is we are featured third party templates and modifications on our home page. These are pulled from our ClassifiedMods.com site and only the ones with the highest ratings are shown. So if you use any third party modification please go rate it. This will not only help new customers find the best things available but also show your appreciation to the developer behind it.

We have also changed our customer section just a little to hopefully make it easier for you to get your downloads. Now on the customer dashboard it lists all your products ordered with a link to download it. This way you will no longer have to go through three steps just to download or change the domain associated with your license. We have additional plans for this portion of our site but didn’t have time to fully integrate them all. Look for those in the coming months.

The forums are also integrated with the new design instead of the way it was before with a totally different layout. I think this makes the site more uniform no matter where you are at or what you are looking for.

Behind The Scenes

The layout portion of the new site was built using the 960 css grid framework and I must say I really like using that framework. It is one that just made sense to me and pretty easy to integrate.

The main site, shopping cart, and customer area is built using the CodeIgniter PHP framework. Actually it has been running that for a while now. This blog is using WordPress and shares the same css style sheet as the main portion.

In Closing

I want to take this opportunity to thank you (our customers) for making us what we are today and with out we wouldn’t be doing what we love. I think it is great to be able to use people that use your product whenever possible and this goes to show that it can be done.

As with any new design it is still a work in progress and if you happen to notice anything out of the ordinary or something that just doesn’t look pleasing please let us know. Also we would love to hear your comments on the new site.

Site Showcase - Ask.Give.Receive

1. Can you tell us a little about you or the site?

Ask.Give.Receive is an experiment in intention and collaboration. Based on the age-old premise that “if you ask you shall receive”, AGR provides a space and a forum for sharing requests for support, stories of giving, and expressions of gratitude for needs fulfilled. By acting as a focal point for assembling messages aimed at creative intention, I hope this site will act as a conduit for their fulfillment.

2. What made you decide to start a classified site?

In setting up the site, I wanted it to be interactive and easy for visitors to post their messages or stories as well as read those others had posted. I investigated structuring it as a blog, but felt that wouldn’t allow people to easily see the range of postings. I then considered using a bulletin board/forum, but, again, it would be too easy for content to be buried. I liked the idea of classifieds because postings are succinct yet easy for people to get more information if they wanted to. Because the premise of the site involves payment for postings, a classified site really seemed best to fit the bill.

3. That is a very unique site. What made you decide to start it?

I’m a strong believer in the practice of creative visualization — by setting a clear intention and focusing on it, it’s easier to achieve one’s goals. Although this process is successful, it is also somewhat intangible because it is not visible or concrete, but based on the idea of energy exchange. The Internet is like this too — it is a very unique medium for sharing ideas and connecting people, but the act of communicating and exchanging ideas is likewise invisible. I got to thinking about the parallels between intentional thinking and the internet, and thought it might be fun to set up a portal where people could communicate their wishes and hopes to a much larger audience, and that, by people sharing the idea, the community itself could grow.

4. In closing anything else you wish to share?

Only that I really like your software (68 Classifieds) — it made it possible for me to get this site up and running exactly as I envisioned it!

Would you like your site showcased? Click here to find out how

Understanding Images

Next to E-mail, images are one of the most misunderstood aspects that impacts users of 68C. So what I would like to do is convey some basic info about images to help you better understand how 68C deals with them and why there are limitations on their size and why its important to have your administration settings for your site set properly.

Image Size
When it comes to images the word “size” can have many different meanings.

File Size
Images, like everything else computer related, are stored in containers called files. These files have a “size” which indicates how much space they take up on a computers hard disk.

Memory Size
What most people dont realize however is that most files used on the internet today are compressed. In other words special standards and algorithms are used to try and retain the data within the file but increase the space the file uses on a computers hard disk.

In order for the data within the file to be accessed however a compressed file needs to be uncompressed. This is done in a computers memory. A file that takes up 1 megabyte on the hard disk may actually take up 20 megabytes in memory depending on its contents and what type of compression is used.

Physical pixel dimension size
Images are made up of pixels which are tiny segments of information which contain color data. These pixels are arranged in a manner that is typically grid like and expressed in width x height.

68 Classifieds and images

68Clasifieds uses a high quality image upload class for handling the resizing of images. When you as a site admin or an ad poster places an ad and uploads an image many things need to take place.

1) the web server works together with the back end scripts and the clients browser to send the image to the web server where it is temporarily stored in its original format. There are certain PHP settings that are out of the control of most users on shared hosting plans which limit the size of the file that can be sent to the server. Additionally there are time limits placed on how long a script can run. If a user has a very slow connection to the internet and is uploading a very large file this execution time limit may be reached and the upload can fail.

It may also happen that your host has a very small temporary space allocated to you and if you and the other server users all are uploading images this temp spae may fill up and in turn the upload may fail.

2) Once the file is on the server in its temporary location 68C uncompresses the images and creates a small duplicate of it for a thumbnail using the settings you provided in admin. It also creates another image to use for the new full size image for the site based on admin settings as well. When done the original image is deleted from the temporary space.

When a file is uncompressed it resides in memory and the amount of memory your scripts are allowed to use is set by the php configuration file. This is totally outside the scope of 68C and is set by your web host. If your admin settings allow your users to upload images that are larger than your server can handle the script will fail. Once again this is NOT a problem with 68C but a limitation you host has imposed.

68 Classifieds Admin settings

68Classifieds allows you to set the image sizes for your thumbnails and your large images (those that get displayed in ads).

In addition you can also specify a max file size for an image as well as max height and width of an uploaded image.

As the pixel dimensions for an image increase the data contained in the file increase exponentially. Also depending on the quality setting for an image when it is saved, the same exact image saved at 2 different quality settings will have very different file sizes and also occupy different amounts of memory when uncompressed.

Most image editing software will show you the size (in kilobytes or megabytes) that an image is using in memory when it is opened. You can simply create empty images of varying pixel dimensions to get a feel for what pixel size images use in terms of system memory.

To view your servers current memory limit you can create a new file, call it what ever you would like as long as it end in .php and place it somewhere on your site. In the file have the following code……

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

The point a browser to it and look for a line called “memory_limit” and that will tell you how much memory your scripts have to work with.

If you open a bunch of files in an image editing application and see that are consuming 20mg etc and your memory_limit on your site is 16mg then trying to upload one of those images will likely fail.

What you are going to have to do is find out your hosts memory limit and then experiment with images that have different dimensions and see how large they are in memory and when saved to disk and use these numbers for your admin settings.

Then lastly, take a minute to alter your sites templates or FAQ to let people know what you file size and dimensional limitations are to save them the hassle of trying to upload images that are too large.

Most modern cameras create images that are much larger than can be processed by most shared hosting plans. Once again this is a limitation with your host and not the 68C software, 68C will handle the images just fine if it is allowed to use enough memory to process the image.

This was written by lhotch at Techconnx.net. Larry is a third party developer and has several modules for 68 Classifieds which can be found at ClassifiedMods.com.