500 Foods Blog

A new project has been added to the 500 Foods website: Everyday IPM.

A new entry for CRUDE was added to the Watchlist and also included in the home page Watchlist.  This is intended to be the current global price for crude oil, as reported by Yahoo! Financials' CL=F ticker symbol.  It is of particular interest of late because of the recent start of the war between Ukraine and Russia and the reports by the US President that this is impacting the price of oil.  Whether or not this is actually the case is perhaps not as a clear cut.  Perhaps raising its visibility will bring a little more clarity to this topic over time.

Tilray's acquisition of Aphria completed on May 3rd, so the APHA stock is no longer listed.  TLRY wasn't previously included in the Watchlist, so it has replaced APHA.

Bitcoin has been added to the Watchlist views, with both the USD and CAD variants listed. 

These are a little different than the other Watchlist items in that there is no 'market' opening for trades with Bitcoin - trading happens 24/7/365.  So some extra steps were taken to ensure that these entries are updated continually as well. 

Notifications

Some effort has been put into settting up a suitable notifications system for content published on the 500 Foods website. While not new to the site, the Digest and Subscription options have been cleaned up considerably, particularly in terms of the formatting of emails that are sent out. Both of these notification systems make heavy use of HTML-enabled e-mail to format the content in a manner that is reflective of the overall theme of the 500 Foods website.

Oasis Web is now available. 

Website Case Study

If you wanted to know a little more about how the 500 Foods website has been put together, checkout a case study that we wrote for Drupal.Org. Drupal is the underlying software that was used to create the website.

Website Performance

While there are currently very few visitors, website performance is still important for a few reasons. First, Google uses (according to some) performance as one of its metrics when rating sites. Better performing sites provide a better overall user experience, the theory goes, so they are deserving of a bump in the rankings. Seems plausible, albeit anecdotal at best.

Ongoing Maintenance

More cleanup and general performance improvements this month. Google has many tools for gauging how well a site is performing. Things like Google PageSpeed Insights,Google Search Console, Google AdSense among others. Firefox and Chrome also include tools for troubleshooting problems and behind-the-scenes issues that impact performance but that might not be visible to visitors.

Maintenance Update

As with any website, some maintenance occurs on a pretty regular basis. The 500 Foods website is no exception of course. Here are some things that have recently been updated or improved upon. As this has been the first full month with the relaunched site, there have been many behind-the-scenes improvements all around, but things have settled down considerably feature-wise as compared to last month.