MATRIXSYNTH Site Tweaks - Making the Site Faster and Cleaner

FYI, I decided to make some additional tweaks to the site in order to improve page load performance and to clean up posts a bit. The changes are not meant to improve server performance, but rather to make the site quicker to load for you (and me), especially on mobile devices. This should be a good thing for all of us. More tweaks may follow behind the scenes. If anything impacts the use and features of the site I will be sure to let you know and of course let me know if you see anything odd.

The site is always a work in progress, and the focus is always the content itself, so be rest assured that will never change. It's all the extra bits around the content that change over time.  I came to realize that if the focus is the content, then anything else that might have an impact on that should have an extremely high bar.

First off, I decided to remove the new Like buttons just mentioned here. There are 10 posts per page on the site and each had to make a call to render and tally any Likes made. Not enough people were using it at the expense of the calls so I decided to nix them. That and for aesthetic reasons - the post footers should be much cleaner now, and you can share direct links to posts in your social channels if you chose to. I also removed the share buttons for the same reason. Update: share buttons are back for now.  Apparently they take up minimal code and I do not believe they make a call to the corresponding service until you click on one, so perf impact in having them should be minimal. We'll see... Aesthetically, they aren't too obtrusive, and they also provide a visual cue between posts.

Second, I moved popular posts and recent comments on the right to one consolidated page along with the archives. This should help with performance as lists no longer have to be created every time you just visit the site. The popular posts list has also been expanded to three sections: the most popular posts over the last 7 days, over the last 30 days, and over the complete history of the site. If you were ever curious what the 10 most popular posts of all time were (out of 128,817 published posts to date), head on over and scroll down.

As always feedback is welcome!