Happy long weekend everyone!

The last week for the tech team here at Whitkirk has been all about configuring, optimising and planning. Here’s what we’ve been up to.

A bit of printer tweaking

We’ve changed how our printer is configured to connect to our network. This is a hangover from the days before we had a network spanning two buildings, and the printer was instead plugged directly into the office computer. The change makes it more reliable, more visible to our network management tools, and most crucially enables us to queue print jobs remotely using our VPN.

Optimise all the images

Following on from last week’s website tweaks, we’ve gone through our entire collection of uploaded images and run them through an optimiser, shaving an average of 60% off the size of each image we serve. These small changes add up, especially for people on lower bandwidth connections, making our site seems faster and more responsive.

Nicer order of service URLs

We’ve set up a new redirection to let us share nicer URLs for our orders of service. We’ve also tweaked some behaviour of our boilerplate text, restricting where it appears to places it’s more likely to be needed.

Some network planning

Our network plays a key part in some of our future plans for both the church and Community Centre, so we’ve been thinking about ways we can make it faster, more reliable and more secure by replacing older and consumer-grade hardware with things that better fit our needs.