Gifteer faster than Usain Bolt?

While Usain Bolt is breaking world records at the track and field world championship in Berlin, Gifteer does the same with wish lists.

Gifteer, the fastest universal wish list site !
We have already explained to you why the site is so fast, but all that really matters to you is that you can add tons of wishes, at lightning speed! Noël is coming soon!!!

Is Gifteer a 2.0 web site ?

At Gifteer we’re all focused on the upcoming release. As always you’ll see a brand new design, but also several important changes to the ergonomy of the site. We’ve tried to take into account all the feedback we got and hope you’ll love the new release.

Because at Gifteer we’re a bunch of technology maniacs, the site is build exclusively on Ajax. A practical result is that Gifteer does not have pages! The only URL you see is www.gifteer.com. The first users quickly came to realize that the Next and Previous buttons of the browser were getting them out of the site. We found out that users definitely had to have these buttons, also we had designed the site so you did not really need them. Like Gmail, we simulated pages using a browsing history on the site. Having to introduce pages, even fake ones, was a heart-breaker for our CTO. It was a technical prowess, one that casual users do not see.

Today, for ergonomics purposes, we got rid of the last ajax animations on the site:  it was a no-brainer, since they were not adding any value functionally. The upcoming version now looks like good old web 1.0… but you know better!

Whether you like it or not, you are using a magnificient RIA application:  Riche Interface Application. Gifteer is no regular site, but a true application running on your browser. As of today we could even make it a off-line application capable of running without an internet connection. So that brings us to the question:  how do you know you’re looking at a web 2.0 site?  There is a debate within the Gifteer team about this!

The 2.0 fans will recognize in Gifteer the main attributes of a true web 2.0 site:  you don’t need to reload the page when you click around, and the site is super fast. We’re only loading the actual component you really need. For example, when you grand a wish, we only modify the necessary areas on the page. But if you don’t pay attention, you won’t even see it.

So yes, you are looking at a great technical feat, a true web 2.0 site!  You may have guessed that we are giving thumbs up to our CTO to keep him upbeat!  So don’t hesitate to let him know how much you like all this behind-the-scene technology!

Migrating to Wordpress 2.7

Done!  Last night we decided to give Wordpress 2.7 a try (we were using 2.6). The migration was painless.

We followed the procedure proposed by Wordpress. We started by exporting the database. Then we simply had to download Wordpress 2.7 and add it to the appropriate folder on our server. The following steps were fairly straightforward:  copy of the files (images, etc.) from the old system to the new, recycle all the plugins and theme versions. Because we did not want to post a maintenance page and we wanted to have the blog up and running at all time, we had to find a little trick. Here it is:  first, we created a new instance of the database; we imported the database export (from the 2.6 version). The trick here was to go to the table “wp_options” and modify the URL using the “siteurl” field. The site at this point was our current version (http://blog.gifteer.com). We had to replace this URL by the technical address of our site that was in the process of migrating. Then we upgraded Wordpress on the technical address, using the upgrade.php script. The upgrade was almost instantaneous. Last step:  DNS change. If you are still with me you’ll know we had to prepare the database to migrate to the production URL. No need to go the database because we had provided this information to the Wordpress admin. The whole thing took less than two hours. The longest was the DNS propagation.

If you are still on the 2.6 version, don’t hesitate. The plugins we had migrated to the 2.7 versions flawlessly. The new admin is well thought and fast.

Gifteer’s lightning speed: THE secret

Have you ever noticed how fast Gifteer is? You can jump from one link to the next without having to wait. But how do they do that?

Maybe you have noticed that your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, …) is only accessing one URL (www.gifteer.com). Wherever you click on, you stay on the same page and can access all the features very quickly, without having to wait for the page to reload.