Site Updates – performance improvements, bug fixes, google search, and more..

You may have noticed that we’ve been scrambling to repair the load of back and front-end bugs that crept up after our unscheduled Indyish upgrade (last month).

Well, up until now, we’ve been silently updating the site with fixes to many of the most pressing problems. Still, we managed to find some time to put through a few tweaks to speed up the site, and even squeezed out a new feature to keep things fresh… ok, that may (or may not) have came out sounding gross but i’m just going to ignore it and keep things moving here..

Most notable changes:

We’re testing out a New Search Feature that uses Google’s awesome technologies to help return better results for your search queries. That means Indyish search results are now smarter, faster, and displayed in a slightly more snazzy way. Go on and do a search – to see for yourself. Note: you can still access the old, built-in search by clicking on the “advanced search” link and selecting “Search using… Indyish” (instead of Google).

Next, we’ve disabled the Visual Editor for all Indyish members (default is now set to “Off”). You can still go to your profile page on the back-end and manually turn it back “On” if you really want to use it. But, for the most part, we believe that it was causing too many problems – particularly for new members.

Also, we’ve been doing some more house keeping around the site and have removed a few of the lesser used features like: the huge RSS button in the right sidebar which seemed to be slowing down the site as well.

Lastly, in the interest of simplifying things like: site maintenance – all the categories and subcategories from the links directory have been compressed into a single links page. We might fix the page up some more in the next few weeks but it’s already pretty useful just as a simple list.