"Homepage Talk" is a series of blog articles that focuses on the Homepage and the issues of it. I will definitely talk about this page frequently as it is the first page you see when visiting this website, thus it's one of the most important pages.

The visitor count was reset earlier today due to unknown reasons. I suspect that it was caused by PHP's file_put_contents function. It accepts a flag called LOCK_EX which applies a file lock when writing to the specific file. I somehow thought it would be fine without this flag, and didn't bother to put it in my code for recording visitors. I'm not very certain about this being the actual cause of the problem, but it's surely very possible. When two people load the homepage almost simultaneously, the second program instance will try to write to the file when it's not properly closed. I guess this is what made the number reset.

As a consequence, I have now altered the text after the count to "since 2019/7/2", which is today (or 2019/7/3 in Beijing time).

Moving on to the homepage itself, I know I have changed the look of the homepage several times in the past five years, but I can't stop thinking about better ways to present this website. Although I successfully made the homepage clean and simple in the most recent update, I now believe that this simplicity leads to the lack of emphasis. Some buttons are larger than others, and because they're so simple, they look nearly the same. People can't distinguish the outstanding works from older, outdated and maintenance-lacking ones.

Sometime in the future, I will experiment with full-height block views that show one particular project at a time. Similar to a slideshow, I'll try to make it visually pleasing and informational. In Homepage 4.0 I tried this form of homepage, but because I used a template other than Bootstrap, I disliked the final presentation. With this clean Bootstrap template, I shall find more success in a slideshow-like homepage.

That wraps up all my thoughts on the homepage today. Stay tuned to my blog for work progress and technological talks!