Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last ditch stand of the artist. -- Marshall McLuhan
I'm pretty excited about the new template and look here for the WGOM. I've tinkered many times with this thing, but now I have what I really want -- tons of information available without refreshing the page AND a nice clean look. Wow.
There are a couple of huge changes. The first, of course, is the huge tab window that is located just below the header. I've set up a number of tabs, including the main tab, which right now has a little information on it with links to a number of recent articles. I've also added a "Featured Articles" tab, which has the last ten featured articles shown in their entirety. It kind of looks like a blog page. What are "Featured Articles"? Well, they are articles other than WGOM Headlines, Cup of Coffee, Notes from the Ditch, Game Logs, and WGOM Videos. Most of what's been written there lately has been ubelmann's writings, but things like "On the Grill", "Barley Pops and Hop Hits" and "Better Know a Citizen" will show up in the "Featured Articles" list.
The WGOM Headlines are located under a tab. Yep, they aren't readily viewable without a click, but they also are in a lot better format. Note to those who submit WGOM Headlines -- you can write more than a sentence now, because you aren't constrained by a 150 px column. So, if you want to make your post a little meatier, go ahead. Also, add tags if you would like that are directed to the content of the posts. I've got a related articles function running, which will make the content richer, if posts can be accessed in the future.
I'm hoping to write more on my "Notes from the Ditch" column. This column is really not about anything related to the main topics of the site -- baseball, basketball, music, movies, wine, food, etc. These are my personal ramblings. I intend to do more with that. The stuff is sitting on a tab, so those who don't want to read my off topic palaver can vote by not reading. It's going to be out there.
One thing to note about the tab window. You can switch from tab to tab without refreshing the page, which is nice, but in order to get new information, you will have to refresh the page. In other words, if you load the page at 1:00PM, don't expect the game log for a 7:00PM page to magically appear. The tab window is nice, but it's not that nice. Maybe someday, I'll have auto refresh on the tabs, but until then, refresh the page for new content.
Another cool thing is the addition of polls. I've been wanting to do this forever, but the poll engine that I have would not work in the old template. It works here, though, and I'm very happy about that. 
I intend to have polls fairly often. The first one will run for a couple of days, but then I'll start making new polls with regularity.
I hope you like the new look and expanded functionality. If you have any feedback, let me know at sbg at stickandballguy dot com. Thanks.
Is that contrast color in the threaded comments...pink???
I don't know, honestly. At least it's not a cross hatch.
Moss always liked the old sepia look, Boss. Any way to work that back in a little?
Also, this site is crying out for a haiku section. Moss can't believe that it's never been encouraged here.
Moss finds format fault.
What does Moss want for nothing?
Chopped liver, perhaps?
Moss likes sepia.
Careful what you ask for, Moss
STRIB commenters lurk.
twayn misses punchline
What do you want for nothing
A rubber biscuit?
D'oh!
Not diarrhea,
Can keep Stick from his good work.
Just shits in his pants.
Umpire points and warns
Pitch was too close to hitter
Gardy ejected
Dread Pirate Will Young
traded blogging for Sheenie;
WPA charts gone
WPA charts gone
At least for now, we've been told
Will has home here, (hint).
I like the new format, but I still think a little splash of color might be nice. Also, if you could work the site admin stuff into the tab line, it'd free up just enough space to add a Word of the Day feature, which I think is that missing .260 hitter at the bottom of the lineup.
Hey, what happened to the HR and batting watch, etc?
I was looking for a good word of the day feature to add in this weekend. It's going to go on the front tab.
I was thinking it could be set up like the videos, where they could be queued up ahead of time, and people could even request a word, etc. The trick would be WGOM citizens would then be challenged to use the word in a Twins-related context.
Take a look at widgetbox.com. A quote of the day widget might be a nice addition, too. I like quotations.
I'm hesitant to put anything on the page that can't be customized to match the look. I'll find something.
btw, one unfortunate byproduct of all the tabs is that the homepage will load much slower, fwiw
Now that you mention it, I think that's the byproduct of me querying the database so often to fill up the front page and various tabs. I wonder if I can make one query, assign it to variables and then use the variables to fill out things. I'll check on that.
I'm on the Ministry of Information Retrieval, so I have a lot of SQL experience (of the Oracle variety, but still); I'd be glad to help out if I can. Certainly combining queries will help a lot if it can be done -- maybe not into one single query, but at least fewer queries.
Yeah, I might need some help. The front tab has five dB queries itself -- realize that these aren't raw SQL commands, but Wordpress functions that perform the queries. I think that there may be a better way to handle what I'm doing.
When I worked for Carleton, we had several pages that were running over a hundred queries and those pages still loaded faster than this site does. Have you tried indexing the DB? That should help speed things up considerably.
Also, regarding combining multiple queries into one, it can help if you do it right. You don't really want to be sorting in the code though, as that is much slower than just running two queries on the same page. If you are running the same query more than once, it can be useful to write an object that handles the queries. If you feed everything through that object, it can simply store the results and if the same query gets repeated, it will just return your old results without repeating the query.
Another idea to speed things up is to basically "pre-run" queries and store the output in a file. For instance, with the "Citizens" column on the side, you could basically set up a cron job to run the query every 5 minutes or something and then dump the html into a file somewhere and just load that file.
Hmmm. I have to figure out how to do that, but that sounds like a good idea. This page, for example is running over 100 queries. That's way too many. A chron job and setting up objects would speed it up, for sure. Part of the slowness, though, has to be the server. It's cheap and worth the price.
I work with Drupal, not Wordpress, but what GreekHouse is talking about is worthwhile: caching. I'm sure WordPress has a caching feature available somehow. A modern CMS like that should handle caching automatically once turned on, you shouldn't need to setup cron jobs and static cached files. Another common form of caching is still in the DB, but you're then retrieving a few blobs of HTML content vs. lots of queries to structured data.
Incidentally, mind if I ask which webhost/plan you're on?
I'm on dreamhost. It's really cheap (~$8 a month) and consequently, I'm not on a dedicated server or anything.
I see this link when I search on "Wordpress cache": http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/
is that something you can use, Boss?
also, I see this blog entry: http://ibloggedthis.com/2006/05/20/wordpress-caching-how-to/
and this one too: http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2007/02/16/four-plus-one-ways-to-speed-up-the-performance-of-wordpress-with-caching/
I added the caching, brianS and it appears to have speeded things up.
fingers are crossed
Today I'm getting a lot of missed hits, where I just get served a blank white page. That was happening in the game logs yesterday, but I thought that was just a byproduct of everyone refreshing a lot, since it was a game log and all.
I've seen a couple of those, too. That's probably just heavy useage on the server. Traffic at the site is a lot higher than I realized. I put in a different program to analyze (heh, this might be a problem, too, I just slowed it down by more than half) non-bot site traffic and it's a couple thousand hits higher than what I previously thought every day (5000 in the last 24 hours and that's pretty much all Sunday). Plus, the bot traffic is unbelievable.
whooo boy. I'm getting to the front page about as often as Nicky P successfully lays down a bunt.
I'm going to pull some stuff out tonight and see if it helps. I think the server is pretty slow today as getting to the admin page is no walk in the park, either.
Im glad this is happening to someone else. I think my YouTubes connection was going all funky chicken on me.