Shockey Monkey Reloaded

This week the development team has been focused on cleaning up Shockey Monkey. This process is mainly composed of three focused categories (UI, Performance, and Bug/Warning Fixes). I would say this has been the largest update to Shockey Monkey since it was originally created over seven years ago. This update should also help lay the framework for any future additions or tweaks.

User Interface

– We’ve applied a consistent look and feel across the entire portal.

– Implemented a themed backend that allows quick and easy branding.

– Improved cross browser support

Performance

– Improved loading performance across the portal.

– Minified most of the JavaScript files to reduce fetch & loading times.

– Implemented more session variables to reduce the amount of queries.

Bug Fixes

– Decreased Disk IO access by resolving more than 1000+ warnings that were constantly being written to a local log file.

– We’ve fixed a handful of bug over the past few weeks and have been continuing to resolve these issues as we enhance the portal.

– If you have a bug, submit it here: https://support.ownwebnow.com/create.asp?item=development

Performance is being improved in several ways across the Shockey Monkey portals. The first thing we did was minified thousands and thousands of lines of JavaScript. The compression ratio on average across all of our scripts was about 65%, which is very good. We’ve also been fixing trivial “warning” messages as we progress through the code. By resolving these warning messages that are generated on the back end, it reducing the amount of disk IO that is required to store this information. Typically this is not a big deal, but multiply that by 1000’s of warning and you get some nasty seek times.

If we go a little bit into the cleanup of the User Interface, it was a project that was mainly focused on consistency. We are also making sure that the look and feel between browser types is very similar. There are also a few special features of the new UI that will really help bring the User experience to a new level. One of these features is the ability to view any page in “Full Screen” mode. What this does is remove the top and side menus from the portal. This allows you to manage any page without the annoyance of having to resize or scroll to achieve simple tasks.

We have a lot more information and a ton more features that we are saving for the unveiling. If you would like to be a part of the Shockey Monkey Reloaded webinar on Thursday, December 1, 2011 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EST, visit the following link: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/812869640.

Hank Newman
VP Development, ExchangeDefender
hank@ownwebnow.com