Web site technical improvements

We’ve made a number of small improvements to our web sites that you might not have noticed over the past day or two.

While the “tootstest” version of the game server is still not back up and running (BRFennPocock is working on a big overhaul), there are a few little improvement making their way in.

Prettier Errors

You’ll see that our sites are beginning to feature new, more attractive and informative error message displays. For example, if you type a URL incorrectly, you’ll now see a friendly error message screen with links to the main pages that you’ll probably find most useful.

Thanks to Shader, we’ve also located an “easter egg” that you might remember from Tootsville IV. Poor Bella!

Bella, the Tiniest Toot Fairy
Bella, the Tiniest Toot Fairy

These same error screens will be making their way into all our related sites over time.

All the error message screens also include a link to a matching page in the Wiki-Wiki to help troubleshooting. Click on (Learn more…) in the left margin to find out about the meaning of the error message.

Underneath this, our analytic system collects information about these error pages. This will help our “Builder Toots” to find problems and correct them, even if players don’t report them to us.

Static Content Server

The artwork, icons, and other shared style information used on some of our web pages is also being updated to use our static (unchanging) content server. This means that when you access commonly used artwork, like the Tootsville logo, your web browser will be able to cache (remember) that image between visits.

All of these things will improve the speed that our pages load, and make it possible to serve more players without overloading our (rather meager) server resources.

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