January 2009 - Posts
In our on-going effort to improve the home page download speed, we've deployed two more fixes this afternoon, and certainly here at FW HQ the page seems to be loading more quickly. I hope this is your experience too.
We've launched a new blog - Phil Clarke's business blog.
Phil is our global and economics editor and will be bringing you regular updates and insight into the agribusiness world: What's happening in the markets and why, and much more.
Take a look. He's already got some feedback to his first post.
http://www.fwi.co.uk/blogs/agribusiness/
We have deployed a fix this afternoon which we hope will improve home page load speeds. For the technical among you, we've altered the cach on the weather widget as that seemed to be haning at times and therefore jamming the rest of the page.
Here at FW it does look to us as if this has improved things. I'd like to hear if it's better for you too. We've another fix to deploy tomorrow which should make things better still.
Thanks for your patience.
I know users have been experiencing problems with the load speed of the home page.
We are working very hard to rectify this. Without going into exhaustive detail, it's to do with the density of database calls we're making to populate all the components of the home page. Making amendments to the caching should help and this is part of the fixes we hope to deploy next week.
In the meantime, if the page doesn't load properly you can sometimes clear the problem by refreshing the page (hit Ctrl F5). This sends a new data request to build the page.
If that's no good, closing your browser and going back in can help.
Sorry for the problems, but we're doing what we can to fix them and to keep you informed.
Traffic on the site has gone through the roof in the past 10 days. I'm hoping the new design accounts for some of it, but I guess it's also the rush back to work after the Xmas break!
If you do have any issues with the new home page do please post them here. It helps us to hear from you so we can make changes to improve the service...
Georgina Downs accuses NFU and others of distorting the truth, but I've just sat in the car listening to PM on Radio 4 on which she implied that yields from organic crops will be little different to those of conventional crops and therefore the removal of pesticides will have no impact on productivity.
As an impartial journalist I prefer to deal in the facts and really Georgina if you want to engage in credible debate you should at least get a grip of reality.
One can argue about how many pesticides will be affected and whether those ones are important to UK/EU agriculture or not, but to imply farmers get comparable yields from organic as conventional is just plain misleading.
Labour's proposed National Internship Scheme got me thinking. Should agriculture get involved?
Already it looks as though one or two major companies (such as Barclays) are interested in exploring ways to alleviate the potential problem of 400,000 graduates not finding jobs this summer.
Agriculture as we know is suffering from a lack of new blood, and maybe the UK farming unions could work together as farming's "default" employer, to use this scheme . How good would it be to exploit the recession to position agriculture for the next generation?
It looks as though the government isn't offering any money, but it might be worth Kendall et al sounding out the skills secretary John Denham...
It's been a long journey but at last our our new-look home page is live (see my previous post).Hats off to our technical team who have worked hard and late to get us to where we are.
There are still various issues to resolve so don't think this is IT! Our techy guys are still beavering away in the background.
This is an exciting development for FWi. Not only have we redesigned, but we're moving the whole site onto a new platform which will allow us to be much more fluid in making changes to pages.
I'm hoping the rest of the site will follow within the next two weeks but this home page should give you a real sense of how the rest of the site will look shortly.
This is a coming of age for FWi and as our teaser ads say: "Agriculture is evolving".
Do please raise any issues/ provide feedback as it's your experiences with this new page that will help us iron out any problems.
Well after many months of agony and hard graft, it looks as though we are about to go live with our new-look home page 
.
This is the culmination of a year's work, including two rounds of research among users to deliver a new style and features that bring FWi right up to date.
Full launch of the whole site should follow soon and will be accompanied by a demonstration video etc. But I would welcome any feedback on this blog to what you think of the new home page when it goes live...watch this space!