A Quantum Immortal

Recently my blog started behaving really slowly, and I finally got down to do an optimization session. There are a ton of wordpress optimization guides out there, and I see no reason to write another full guide. Still, I think it’s worth it to share  how I cut a good deal of my blog’s load time using three simple steps:

Step one – measure it. I used Website Optimization for the comprehensive measurements (there are a lot of other options out there!), plus a local “timethis wget ripper234.com” to get a subjective feel.

Step two – reduce clutter. In the report I got from Website Optimization, I noticed I had a lot of objects. Nowadays with Facebook Like button, rating widgets, and other gizmos, a lot of pages are loaded with baggage. However, I didn’t find anything specific I’d like to remove, so I went for another easy solution – simply reducing the number of posts on my main page from 10 to 8 – this cuts down a lot of the load time. The exact timing varies by connection speed and other parameters, so let me just say that the total size of objects on my main page went down from a whopping 1,032,328 bytes to 742,197 – almost a 30% improvement! (obviously, this depends on post size distribution, but I imagine it will be significant in most cases). Let’s face it, your readers won’t really miss those last two posts that you dropped from your main page.

Step three – start actually using a cache plugin! I did have WP Super Cache installed a while back, but I never got down to tuning it. When I checked out the advanced tab I noticed that my blog wasn’t compressing pages (off by default). This alone shaved off another 25% of the total objects size, now down to 557,199 bytes.

Overall, Website Optimization claims about 40% improvement in page load time over a theoretical T1, I believe that the actual improvement in page load time in reality is larger, especially for users behind crappy Israeli ISPs.

I know there are a lot of other optimization techniques and measurement tools out there. Still, remember that the purpose of this post wasn’t to be a complete optimization guide, but rather to focus on the “easy and dumb optimizations” that have greatest ROI.

Today, I installed Windows 7 RTM. Trying to login to StackOverflow, I found that Verisign’s login portal crashed.

This locked me out of all my OpenID enabled websites (effectively, the StackOverflow trilogy). Luckily, my OpenID is really my blog’s URL, just delegated to Verisign. After spending a good fifteen minutes just finding where to disable the delegation, I finally found and disabled it, regaining the ability to log on.

I was waiting for such a post to upgrade. Took 6 minutes, including this post, using WordPress Auto-Upgrade plugin. Still need to explore the new version though. And I still need to tweak Simple Tags plugins.

Update – Things I like:

1. I finally found where to manage spam comments. I accidentally marked a bunch of legitimate comments as spam the other week, and for the life of me, just couldn’t find how to undo it. In 2.7, you can access all comments from the dashboard.
2. Finally, built in Ajax

Since I moved to my own host I played with a few useful tools.

• I already commented on the wordpress plugins I use. Today I’m adding OneClick – single click plugin installer & updater – it makes it really easy to install a plugin by a URL). It also has a Firefox extension, which I didn’t install. I just revisted Moti’s comment on the above post, and saw this was one of his recommendations. The other recommendation I accepted is FeedBurner FeedSmith, although I already implemented itse functionality with the redirect plugin.
• A handy tool (depending on your hosting solution) is PHPShell. It uses the provided PHP to give you an easy shell, if your provider doesn’t give you one.
• Finally, Google’s webmasters’ toolkit is a good tool for analysing your blog/site – recommened.

What tools do you use?

Also, I just saw my old pagerank of 4 is gone now, because I have no direct links to this blog, just to the old Blogger one (well, was to be expected). I’d appreciate it if any of you with incoming blogroll links update to the new website (yeah I know, I should start a blogroll as well … someday).

P.S.

Heroes season 3 appears to be less bad than season 2.

I’ve been wanting to do this for sometime now, and just now got the will & time to move from my old blogspot blog.

I don’t like Blogger anymore. They do not respond at all to support questions, and the automatic method of transferring my blog to a purchased domain failed miserably, even though I bought the domain through Blogger itself!

I contemplated between WordPress and dasBlog as my blogging platform. dasBlog is written in ASP.Net / C#, which is inherently better (and more familiar to me) than PHP, in which WordPress is written. However, I already installed and customized a WordPress installation, and I found on Google 220M references to wordpress vs only 790K references to dasBlog. A rich user base is often reason enough to choose a product over a similar competitor, and since it works rather well and has tons of plugins I’ve decided to stick with it – I don’t think I’ll be spending huge amounts of times debugging and customizing my blog anyway (besides stealing Eli‘s simple anti-SPAM challenge).