Good to see you here. Are you finding the site ok now? There were a few problems with our ISP and server load around that time, but on the whole things are working fairly well now, as far as I can see.

We are waiting for the ISP to move us to a different server, which should help reliability. If there are delays on our side, it's probably because of certain plugins running, so it would help to isolate which areas of the site are slow and which are running normally. If you spot anything, can you report it here?

We're working on a new site design for the autumn, so this may help with the both speed and usability.

cheers,

Martin

Me again. Can anything be done to speed up the site? It still takes ages to load anything.

Seventypercent has been and continues to be a great inspiration to me, but the speed keeps me from quickly seeking it out. It would be sad if this were a deterrent for others as well. Especially at a time when so much is happening in chocolate!

Thanks and keep it up,

Alex

Thanks! Yes, I've been AWOL for a while now ;-) But I'm back and keeping up with the chocolate world (this includes working at a chocolate shop now).

And I've just noticed that the speed of the site has certainly picked up! I didn't mean to be a nag.

Another thing I noticed is that the site works better on my Mac at home. My PC here at work (where I shouldn't be logging in to 70% anyhow ;-) doesn't display the drop-down menus on the homepage correctly. They drop behind the photos and therefore can't be clicked or read.

I look forward to the new review section. Every now and then I like to check an old review on a bar by Valrhona, for example. BTW, have you noticed that the page numbers on the blog page and the review page don't work? I've clicked on page numbers to move on, but nothing happens.

Did you until recently tie-in blogs by other bloggers? That was interesting! Nice to see what is going on elsewhere. But there is so much going on! All these new chocolates from the US and whatnot. I'm having trouble keeping up. Thank goodness I've found ways to get my hands on these exciting new bars...

All the best to you and Happy New Year too!

Alex

Good to see you back!

We had some issues with the new
server - which was meant to fix all the previous issues, but didn't! The
site is now on yet another machine, which is proving much faster and
you should find it a lot better.

We're currently building a new
review home page, which will include easy searches by chocolate maker,
etc. All your points are valid and when we've finished implementing all
the changes and updates that are planned, hopefully you should find
everything as easy to use as before, if not better.

This then
gives us a much better, more integrated platform to from. It's all work
though, and takes time - if only I could disappear on a Caribean island
(with internet access) and spend a month doing everything! Oh well,
back to reality!

cheers and Happy New Year!

Martin

I'm not here as regularly as I used to be but thought I'd comment on the new site.

I like the new look, but have to check it out on a Mac before I can say more. There is still much to get used to, but the speed is definitely an issue for me. It takes quite a while for the site to open and when you click somewhere you have to wait a bit longer than I prefer. This seems to be a trend with some sites. Is it because of the Twitter link-in perhaps? 

Looks like a couple of things are still being worked on, so I guess it's too early to say more. However, I do miss the easy access to the reviews, for example. In the past you were able to click on a producer and get all of their reviews, now it looks to me as if the reviews are only chronologically ordered. Or am I missing something? Like I said, I still need to get used to the site, which is also a bit of a downside for me. The old site was a lot more user-friendly.

Sorry for all the negative points. I know a lot of effort has gone into making 70%.com fresher and more accessible. At the moment I'd say fresh - yes, but a bit clunkier.

Alex

"Porcelana: The Holy Grail of Pure Criollos" (Maricel E. Presilla)

All registrations have to be approved by the admin (i.e. me), because of the huge amount of spam registrations. Somehow, some of these are now getting past this check. We're still looking into how this happened.

All the spam accounts and posts have now been removed, please let me know if you come across any I've missed by emailing me through the forum.

In the very near future we plan to move to new forum software, as the current software (Snitz) is well out of date and is now not being seriously maintained or improved. The new forum will be part of the Wordpress blogging software that we now use for The Pod, so members will also be able to comment on posts there and advanced members will also be able to create their own posts.

The migration is quite a big job though and technically tricky, but I hope it can be completed over the summer.

cheers,

Admin (Martin)

Site Admin
http://www.seventypercent.com

"Porcelana: The Holy Grail of Pure Criollos" (Maricel E. Presilla)

Its most annoying for all of the serious chocolate people, can't you put a stop to it?

Apologies to all for the inconvenience.

Alex Rast
Alex_Rast_Alternate@hushmail.com