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Increasing My Blogs Load Speed

June 14, 2009

: 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 😀 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 😀

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 😀

NewMovies.ie — Live Online

June 10, 2009

So here it is today, as promised i have launched my new website: newm ovies.ie There has definitely been a lot of work put into creating this site. The site actually is running on open source software, Joomla! 😀

Up until now i had never used Joomla! before in my life. I always thought it was very complex and i was not ready to get into learning the way it works. Now however after over a month of toying around with Joomla! i am now confident with how it works, where everything is and also how some parts of the layout code work.

So in case its not obvious what this site is about i am going to give a bit of a brief summary on what it is and what it has. First off the site revolves around Films/Movies, more importantly the latest movies being released to cinemas. At the moment we have about 40 film trailers on the website and also a few film reviews.

These numbers will begin to rise over the next few weeks as we will be adding more and more content. Most movie sites focus on when films will be coming out in the United States, however not too many, i can only think of one other, actually focus just on what movies will be coming out in Ireland.

So if you are from Ireland, like us, you will definitely enjoy this site because you will see all the latest films that will be coming to our cinemas. Currently we list the current films in the cinemas and also we have a few films that were previously in the cinema and also have a few films that will be coming in the near future. There will however be a lot of new films added soon to the site because that is the whole concept of the ‘new’ part of newmovies.ie

Anyway there is a lot more i could say, instead why not go over and have a look at the site, maybe sign up, or just to our newsletter. You can even submit movie reviews, rate movies and also there is a forum where you can go to discuss your favorite films and actors!

Now Thats Great Customer Care!

June 07, 2009

: Image by itBox24 via Flickr

Yesterday morning I received a call from Vodafone. They said they were just going to ask a few questions to make sure that I was getting the best service available. So I decided I would have a listen, usually I hate these conversations, but since it was early in the morning I didn’t really mind 😀

They just asked me if I knew about all the services available to me such as, cheap calls when going abroad, a €2 IOU service for when I was out of credit and also free calls and texts! Of course I already knew all about this, but I let the man on the phone go on about it for a while 😉 I just wanted to hear if there was anything that I did not already know about.

I already signed up to all of these services that he was offering me, if he had of checked my record he would of seen this and could of saved himself a call, but sure it’s always great to let people do their job!

So as a kind of good will gesture, at the end of the call he told me that Vodafone would like to offer me a €20 voucher for their online store, I was not expecting this at all and all I had to do was give them my e-mail address so they could send me it. And within a few hours I got the voucher.

I am really glad I listened to that call now 😀 I will remember that next time I get that kind of call, it pays to listen! So if you happen to be on the Vodafone network and get this call, apparently they are calling a few of their customers, I recommend that you listen to what they have to say. It is worth the few minutes 😀

A Good Idea For A WordPress Plugin/Feature

June 03, 2009

: 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 😀

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.

Samsung SyncMaster 2233bw Monitor Review

April 30, 2009

So today my new Samsung SyncMaster 2233bw monitor arrived. I ordered it exactly one week ago and it is here already, now that is really fast. The last time i ordered something from Pixmania it took about 4 weeks!, but that delay was caused by the high amount of packages that were being sent since it was Christmas time.

Shortly after i arrived home from college today i got a phone call, it turned out to be the DHL delivery man, he was looking for directions. It was great i had’nt expected it to be delivered today, I had thought it might of come on friday. So i got the package after signing for it and straight away begun to open it 😀

From the appearence of the box it didnt look like it was going to be very big, but by the time i had it opened and set up it looked pretty big and impressive. But once it was finally switched on, i really noticed the difference. The screen resolution is 1680 x 1050 pixels.It is really bright and displays the different colours brilliantly. Also it is 22″ in size and and has built in features such as MagicBright, MagicColor and so on. Also it has a built in sleep timer so it wont be wasting any power, you just simply set how long you want before it shuts off, simple 🙂

samsung syncmaster 2233bw monitor

So in the box was the monitor (Obviously), a VGA cable, a DVI cable, power cord, cleaning cloth, manual, warranty card and a driver disc. It was really easy to set up and was definitly worth the €169 that i paid 😀

When i was going to order this new monitor i wanted one that had support for DVI, i recently noticed that i had a port for a DVI connection and decided that when i was going to change the screen that i would like it to support DVI, since DVI outputs a higher quality picture. Up until now i have been using the VGA cable, which is basically standard with most monitors. Also i kept in mind that i wanted the new monitor that i ordered to be in widescreen format, because i was getting tired of my old monitor, it was square and when you are looking at a monitor all day, it is best to have a nice big screen with a really crisp picture 😀

So I would definitly recommend buying this monitor, all of this for only €169, it is definitly worth it. You can get it over at Pixmania.