Archive - November 2000
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Increasing My Blogs Load Speed
Posted by: Sean | Posted on: June 14th, 2009 | 1 Comments
- Image via Wikipedia
A problem that I have always found on my blog is the speed that it loads at. It takes far too long for my content to display fully and although in reality it only takes a few seconds, it will frustrate people because most people are used to the content displaying instantly ( maybe they never experienced dial-up before, so they cannot be grateful for the speed difference) ;).
Anyway my blog is of course powered by the open-source platform: Wordpress. In my opinion the best platform for blogging. So yesterday I spent a lot of time trying to find different ways on how I could increase the performance of my blogs load speed, and it has definitely been successful.
So first off I went around a variety of different blog posts reading the different methods people used and also reading a lot of tips on how to go about improving load speed/time. So the first thing is that my blog used to take approximately 2.5 seconds to load, of course this speed varies from page to page, but on average the load time would be 2.5 seconds. It’s not too bad, however there is always room for improvement and I hate having to wait for my blog to load, so that means if it annoys me it will definitely annoy others :D and also if people have to wait for a page to load they will generally give up and go elsewhere and you will now have lost out on a new visitor :(.
So here are the few steps that I took to increase my blogs performance. Before you do any of this I always recommend backing up your database and export a copy of your blog posts (Just incase ;) ). So apparently when you install plugins and then remove them and save and edit your blog posts and pages it will cause a lot of inconsistencies within your blogs database. By having all of these inconsistencies it can contribute to your database being very complex and will in turn cause the site to slow down, and that is what we do not want. So the solution I used to fix this was a simple plugin that is called: 'Fix Database'. It will add a page to your admin backend under the settings section called fix database, so once you click into it there is only one button in it saying fix database, once that is clicked it runs through the database fixing and optimizing your database by updating table information.
The next thing I done was to add a cache system to my site, this will save a copy of the page for a set amount of time so that when you next visit the site the page will be loaded from the cache and will cause less communication to be needed to your server so page will load quicker :D. The plugin I used for this cache in my site is called WP Super Cache, this is probably the most popular cache plugin used on wordpress. By going though the various setting in the WP Super Cache plugin you can set when and how long a page will be cached for, for example you might want the cache page to load until a new post is added and then have the cache cleared so visitors can see the new post you have added. Also you can turn on compression so that less space is used by the cache pages. Having a cache on your blog is a must and especially if your traffic is very high.
The final plugin I added is called WP-DBmanager, this is another plugin for maintaining your database and it does contain a lot of complex settings that I do not bother messing with. However there are a lot of useful things such as being able to repair and edit your database and also you can make queries into your database, I would not really make many queries into my database but it is always helpful to be able to do this. Also you can make back-ups of your database and download them or have them e-mailed to your e-mail address. Also you can set your blog to automatically send a backup daily to your site so if your blog goes down you won’t lose anything and also you can set it to automatically optimize the database on a regular bases so that your site will be in a great performance state.
So after doing all of this the new page load speed on average now is about 0.777 seconds, that is now less than a third of the original load speed (2.5 seconds) before I added all of these plugins. So I am happy at the moment on my blogs performance :D
Also in terms of administration I have increased speed in the back-end of the site by upgrading to wordpress 2.8, it has helped a lot but the speed in the back-end never really annoyed me too much :D
A Good Idea For A WordPress Plugin/Feature
Posted by: Sean | Posted on: June 3rd, 2009 | 3 Comments
- Image by Kate loves Bar Pt via Flickr
I was thinking that when it comes to writing a blog post, at least once i will make a spelling mistake. Usually i will save the post as a draft and then pop over to see a preview of how the post will look once i finally publish it. I would then read through the full post and look for any spelling mistakes that i may have done and not noticed.
I always find at least one. I was thinking that a great plugin/feature that could be made or implemented into wordpress would be the abilitly to edit the post live when viewing your site. So the concept of this would be that it would only work if you were logged into you site and then view the site while logged in, it would be great that if i was looking at a post that i could just click the text and edit it live without having to continuously flick to and from the post editor, it would save a lot of time and would be such a convenience.
That is just a thought i was having, as far as i know this has not been made for wordpress yet, and if it has i would love to know how i can do it :D
If i had any idea how to go about making a wordpress plugin i reckon i would try and make one like this as i am sure a lot of people would benefit from a live text editior for wordpress.
100th Blog Post!
Posted by: Sean | Posted on: May 24th, 2009 | 0 Comments
Getting to your 100th blog post is considered to be a big achievement, it shows you are commitment to your blog. Well now I have reached my 100th blog post and I can’t believe it! Apparently once you get to 100 there is no stopping you :D or so I hear!
It doesn’t really feel like I have written 100 posts though, this might be because it took over a year! Yes that is a long time for such a small amount of posts. But the bulk of them have only been written within the past few months of this year. Since March of this year I decided I would begin a regular update by adding a post every now and again. So since March I have written 60, that is 60 out of the 100! So what the hell did I do for the other 9 months which I only managed to post 40!
Most of those other posts were vague posts; they didn’t really have many points of interest and were very short in length. Now however my post length has begun to grow. I used to find it slightly difficult to write to this blog, I would just have no idea on how to go about beginning the post. But once you start a post the rest of it tends to come more naturally to you. The first paragraph is usually the hardest, once that is written it just starts to flow better.
So as of Thursday of this week I am free for the summer from college, no more until the beginning of September :D Next week I want to get four things done. The first is I want to add back in my About page to this blog, most likely nobody has noticed that this has gone, but I have! I took it down when I changed the design of this blog. It was a little outdated and vague. So now I want to add a short 2 or 3 paragraph 'About Me' page so that readers of this blog can find out a little more about who I am.
Next on the agenda after that will to finish updating a website for a Limousine company, I had meant to get this started about 2 weeks ago but I put it on hold because my exams were on, but now that I am finished with that I want to get it done. Also the person that owns the site is really eager to get the site updated as you can imagine he specializes in wedding cars and this is the season where a lot of people like to get married since there is a good chance of sunshine.
And then the next thing I want to get done is finish off adding content to my new .ie partnership site with Smemon and then finally get it launched within the week. I want to have a lot more content on the site before we launch it. I aim to have at least 10 times the amount of content on the website before it is launched, I will take note of what I have done so far and reflect back on it when the launch date of the site arrives. The launch date has yet to be confirmed but I would imagine it might be mid-week or Friday. Once this site is finally launched it will be a matter of continuing to add as much content as I can and get that visitor count up as much as we can. The design of the site is really nice and compliments the content really well, it is simple and easy to navigate through.
And now the final thing I want done does not have to be completed for at least a month or two. It is a site that I have wanted to build for a long time now and I believe I have finally found a great template that I can use with a little bit of tweaking. The site will be a news based site, on what I will not say as it is too early for that. I may look for people to help out with adding content to it, but that may not work out. If you want to help out with this little project idea of mine you can contact me through my contact form on this site. Another thing about the site will be that it is going to be running on the Joomla! platform.
I have recently begun to use Joomla! for the .ie site that I am working on and have begun to really grasp on how it works. A few months ago I had no clue on how it worked, it seemed far too complex for me to use it and I played around with it before and just gave up. But for this next website I want to build, Joomla! will be a perfect match as it has the power behind it for this site.
I used to always try and build websites using wordpress as I had mastered on how to use wordpress and how to edit the themes, I knew what linked to where and where to find things that I needed, I also learned how to remove encrypted footers and also how to fix theme preview issues that I had. Wordpress really was the first time that I really began to work with php, by getting stuck in with it I quickly began to grasp the different terms used in php coding language. Wordpress is really good for beginner website users. I would not recommend beginning off with joomla! because it would just confuse you more than anything on your first look at it.
I used wordpress as a stepping stone towards joomla!, with learning the simple CMS (Content Management System) of wordpress it gave me an idea on where things might be in joomla! such as plugins and modules, also I learned how different files communicated in wordpress and this helped me with how the different files communicate in joomla!.