The location text under my photo has had a morph. Instead of being a text box, it is now a graphic. Basically the reason is performance. When the location database is not loaded into RAM on the server, it may take up to three seconds to do the transaction to work out where the Lat/Lon points to. And this would hold up rendering of part of the page since it was being implemented on demand as a script.

So what is happening now is that I am using the GD library in PHP to dynamically create a graphic 150 x 50 pixels with text added to the graphic. This graphic can be allocated to that size when the page is initially rendered, so there are few performance issues. Then a few seconds later the graphic will appear. So simple. If for some reason the underlying systems are not available the graphic will simply not display.

I have been busy this morning working on the reporting functions of TeamTrack. One of my clients is wanting emailed reports every morning, and has a whole load of sales when this is available. So guess what? I am busy working on this as we speak. Initially this will be a hard coded list of what reports to be run, and the batch will need to be started manually, but I cannot see how it would be too hard to implement. Famous last words I guess though 😉