Alex Harries's diary

One thing that really bugged me about the way this site runs is that, whenever you use the "back" button in your browser, the page re-loads. This isn't a standard thing - if you go to, say BBC.co.uk and click a link at the bottom of the homepage, then use the back button to go back to the homepage, you'll still be at the bottom of the page and you won't have to wait for it to reload. On UPSU.net, every time you visit a page it re-loads; this is great for making sure you see the latest version of a page, e.g. the homepage or the forums, but it's terrible for our bandwidth and your page load times.

Because one of the main things I'm aiming for with UPSU.net is to make it as fast as possible to navigate around, I've decided to try turning off the code which tells your browser to reload the page each time you visit it.

Another thing we've added is the "sign in" box in the navigation bar of every page; now, if you need to sign in to the site, you can find a username and password box at the top of the page. Fill them in and click "sign in" and you're automagically signed into the site. At the moment, you're also returned to the page you were just browsing, but I think it will be better to send people to their profile homepage since this is where you can look after your account; I've been trying things out the former way for the past few days, and I'll be deciding later whether to try it using the latter method for a while to see if it's a better way of moving people around the site.

As always, I can't test each page on every type of browser, so your feedback is always welcome - just add your comments below as normal - if this post is greeted with the eternal sound of tumbleweed rolling across the comments box, I'll assume that everything's gone to plan and no-one's suddenly found UPSU.net isn't working for them anymore... ;o)