RickBeckman.org » Kingdom Front

Ordinarily at this time on a Friday morn­ing, I’d be relent­lessly press­ing snooze but­ton on my alarm clock in a futile bat­tle against going to work. As inde­scrib­ably excit­ing as that is, this morn­ing I’ve been able to do some­thing sub­stan­tially more excit­ing; unless you’re new here, you’ve undoubt­edly already noticed some things which are very different.

After 175 days of being name­less, RickBeckman.org is now known as Kingdom Front! Coinciding with the brand­ing is also a change in the design of the site, eschew­ing K2 for the leaner, meaner Neoclassical. Various other changes abound as well, and hon­estly, I’m by no means done mak­ing them!

Kingdom Front‽ What the heck does that mean?

The name was heav­ily inspired by Bible stud­ies which I’ve been lead­ing in our home from the Gospel According to Mark. Jesus’ teach­ings in Mark that we’ve cov­ered have been very hard hit­ting, and they are def­i­nitely of the “where the rub­ber meets the road” variety.

As an exam­ple, Jesus said in 3:34 – 35, “Here are my mother and my broth­ers! ³⁵Whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sis­ter and mother,” (ESV).

Jesus here estab­lishes that the Kingdom of God super­sedes even bio­log­i­cal fam­ily. In so doing, He cre­ates a front — a line of divi­sion between the king­dom of this world and His Kingdom.

Therein is the inspi­ra­tion for “Kingdom Front”; as a part of His Kingdom, I am called to stand on the bat­tle­front of two oppos­ing king­doms. And always am I com­forted by the thought that the gates of Hell never stood a chance.

Okay, enough about the name… How’s the site performing?

Perhaps the most sig­nif­i­cant rea­son I did this redesign was that I was dis­sat­is­fied with how poorly the site was per­form­ing. Pages rou­tinely took any­where from six to fif­teen sec­onds to load; my Internet con­nec­tion is via a cable modem, and frankly, I shud­dered to think what it must be like to be brows­ing the site via a dial-​​up modem.

Browsing around now, it seems pages are load­ing with three sec­onds. The most sub­stan­tial items to be down­loaded are the ran­domly dis­played header images; how­ever, I ensured that these are cacheable. Unless you clear your browser’s cache or oth­er­wise force the images to be refreshed from the server, they are sent with a five year cache header. That should help out any dial-​​up users who are reg­u­larly using the site.

According to YSlow, which pre­vi­ously gave this site a pretty low rat­ing, the only prob­lems which exist now are so minor, I’m ignor­ing them for the time being; the prob­lems mainly con­sist of objects — such as JavaScript or Flash — not being sent with future cache headers.

Overall, the YSlow grade has gone from an F to a solid B on most pages; cer­tainly the con­tent of posts and/​or com­ments will affect the grade, and it is just not worth the time to go through every sin­gle post and ensure that YSlow is giv­ing it a good grade. The core site works swell, and that’s far more important.

If you’re so happy with the design, why does X, Y, and Z look so crappy?

Hey, how would you feel if I called your site crappy? I have feel­ings you know!

Hmm, okay, I admit, there may very well be things that look down­right crappy. My test site didn’t have the wide vari­ety of posted con­tent that this site has, so I undoubt­edly missed styling cer­tain things. I do plan to go through the bulk of my archives here, clean­ing up the markup to bring it in line with the new theme. Until that time, please be patient.

Hey, where’d the Cars toys col­lec­tors’ pages go?

They were hope­lessly out­dated and have been super­seded for quite some time by Lightning McWiki. Requests for the old col­lec­tors’ pages will (should!) seam­lessly redi­rect to an appro­pri­ate page at the wiki.

Well, I’m here; can I at least have a mint?

As far as keep­ing track of sta­tis­tics here, I’ve decided to com­pletely wipe the slate clean. I also decided to open up view­ing the stats to the pub­lic; fol­low the “Mint” link in the footer of this page if you are curi­ous enough to care!

Umm, did you know that A, B, and C are broken?

Maybe I do; maybe I don’t, so I’d greatly appre­ci­ate it if you dropped a com­ment below let­ting me know what’s screwed up so that I can work on fix­ing it. :D This was a bit of an ambi­tious refac­tor­ing of the site — I tweaked plu­gin code, fid­geted with just about every aspect of the theme, dab­bled in the mys­ti­cal voodoo of Apache rewrites, and more — so if every­thing is actu­ally run­ning prop­erly here, I’ll truly be surprised.

I really do hope you enjoy the new style of the site, and I appre­ci­ate any and all feed­back. Be brutal!