Housekeeping: Site Improvements
By Jonathan Bailey • Nov 7th, 2007 • Category: Articles, HousekeepingJust a heads up to everyone that I took time out yesterday to make some improvements to PT that will, hopefully, cause it to load faster and work better.
First, I installed WP Super Cache to create static pages for most of the site. Those of you who are logged in or post comments to the site may not notice the full effect but the server seems to be moving a great deal faster than it was and I remain perpetually logged in.
Also, I removed the donation graphic on the right hand sidebar. It was greatly increasing the load time of the site and wasn’t generating any real money. I am still accepting donations through the donations page and may look at other techniques, but that method was not working well.
Please let me know if these improvements help the site move faster and if you have any problems.
Also, those who were following the haunted house I was working on last month will find a slideshow with some of the images from it below as well as a very short video walkthrough of it. Once I get my video capture card working I might try to post some of the footage taken during the haunt itself.
Thank you all for your support!
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Jonathan Bailey is The Webmaster and author of Plagiarism Today, which he founded in 2005 as a way to help Webmasters going through content theft problems get accurate information and stay up to date on the rapidly-changing field. He is also a consultant to Webmasters and companies to help them devise practical content protection strategies and develop good copyright policies.
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This does seem to have made a big difference!
Jonathan - In your email you mentioned that WP Super Cache requires modification to our htaccess file. This is not a problem for me as I use a customized htaccess file already. But I don’t see in the documentation page of the plugin anything that explains the modification needed. Does it do it automatically? Or do we need to do something manually? If automatically, I guess I would just need to be careful to re-edit my htaccess customizations back in after activating the plugin.
-Will
Will, the instructions for modifying the .htaccess file is in the readme file for the plugin. It is a manual modification that you have to reach in and make yourself. I ended up briefly causing this site to blank out due to my modifications so be careful! It doesn’t seem to like other modifications being present.
This does seem to have made a big difference!
Jonathan - In your email you mentioned that WP Super Cache requires modification to our htaccess file. This is not a problem for me as I use a customized htaccess file already. But I don’t see in the documentation page of the plugin anything that explains the modification needed. Does it do it automatically? Or do we need to do something manually? If automatically, I guess I would just need to be careful to re-edit my htaccess customizations back in after activating the plugin.
-Will
Will, the instructions for modifying the .htaccess file is in the readme file for the plugin. It is a manual modification that you have to reach in and make yourself. I ended up briefly causing this site to blank out due to my modifications so be careful! It doesn’t seem to like other modifications being present.
OK - I read the file. That is a very complicated install for a plugin!
I have a feeling from looking at the readme file that the plugin authors assume you have no previous customizations to the file and that you are fairly advanced in your technical abilities.
Also, it looks like the edits that are required in the root htaccess, (if I am deciphering that readme file correctly), to make the plugin work may not get along well with the customizations I already have there.
I’ll have to give some real thought to whether I am up to dealing with installing this!
But anyway, thanks for posting about it!
-Will
It was probably the single hardest install of a plugin I did, why there wasn’t more of a story today for PT. It took me a few hours and, yes, any other htaccess mods can affect it, that is what happened to me.
I had to wipe my file, set up my permalinks again and recreate the file from scratch. Fortunately, I only had one other mod and I’ve readded that.
It is worth it, but it is also a lot of work. Backup before you do anything!
OK - I read the file. That is a very complicated install for a plugin!
I have a feeling from looking at the readme file that the plugin authors assume you have no previous customizations to the file and that you are fairly advanced in your technical abilities.
Also, it looks like the edits that are required in the root htaccess, (if I am deciphering that readme file correctly), to make the plugin work may not get along well with the customizations I already have there.
I’ll have to give some real thought to whether I am up to dealing with installing this!
But anyway, thanks for posting about it!
-Will
It was probably the single hardest install of a plugin I did, why there wasn’t more of a story today for PT. It took me a few hours and, yes, any other htaccess mods can affect it, that is what happened to me.
I had to wipe my file, set up my permalinks again and recreate the file from scratch. Fortunately, I only had one other mod and I’ve readded that.
It is worth it, but it is also a lot of work. Backup before you do anything!
ick - that install is even a bit too messy for my liking. Think I’ll stick with WP-Cache for now….
That’s a pretty gory haunted house you got there, I love the little “and… we’re out” at the end of that video.
ick - that install is even a bit too messy for my liking. Think I’ll stick with WP-Cache for now….
That’s a pretty gory haunted house you got there, I love the little “and… we’re out” at the end of that video.
Jeremy, Like I said, worst plugin install I’ve ever had but it appears to be worth it. Now if only I could get Divshare to light a fire under it we might be doing good.
Hopefully they’ll simplify future versions of the install though.
Glad you liked the haunt, or at least I’ll take gory as a compliment. The “And we’re out” is actually a funny side story to the night.
We had been working for about three and a half hours, the actors were hot and tired but had to do this one thing before they can go home. I felt like a slave driver since they were all working for free.
I hurried through the walkthrough and, when I said that, they hit the door running. They were all cool about it and hung out for some of the pictures.
It was hot in that garage though and next year we’re adding A/C.
Jeremy, Like I said, worst plugin install I’ve ever had but it appears to be worth it. Now if only I could get Divshare to light a fire under it we might be doing good.
Hopefully they’ll simplify future versions of the install though.
Glad you liked the haunt, or at least I’ll take gory as a compliment. The “And we’re out” is actually a funny side story to the night.
We had been working for about three and a half hours, the actors were hot and tired but had to do this one thing before they can go home. I felt like a slave driver since they were all working for free.
I hurried through the walkthrough and, when I said that, they hit the door running. They were all cool about it and hung out for some of the pictures.
It was hot in that garage though and next year we’re adding A/C.
I spent time reading the super cache site and blog. From all the assumptions made about how well readers should understand what is written there, I think this plugin is purposely intended for very technical users. It might not ever be made user friendly enough for the rest of us. wp-super cache 2.0 is out and in 3 days there are 175 comments on the post about it! I am not sure I really understand anything that is being said there. Makes you feel like a real novice at this stuff. On the other hand, I think plugins should be made accessible to the masses, not just a few select techies.
They also recommend installing another plugin, called xcache, along with super cache. xcache is a very technical, difficult to comprehend and install plugin also!
I read recently that the number one complaint about WP is slowness. Apparently it can not be addressed because it would involve a complete re-writing of the whole “core”, (whatever that really is), to fix it.
Jeremy - You are using wp-cache on a 2.3.1 install of WP. I have seen that it is problematic on 2.3. Is it working well for you?
I spent time reading the super cache site and blog. From all the assumptions made about how well readers should understand what is written there, I think this plugin is purposely intended for very technical users. It might not ever be made user friendly enough for the rest of us. wp-super cache 2.0 is out and in 3 days there are 175 comments on the post about it! I am not sure I really understand anything that is being said there. Makes you feel like a real novice at this stuff. On the other hand, I think plugins should be made accessible to the masses, not just a few select techies.
They also recommend installing another plugin, called xcache, along with super cache. xcache is a very technical, difficult to comprehend and install plugin also!
I read recently that the number one complaint about WP is slowness. Apparently it can not be addressed because it would involve a complete re-writing of the whole “core”, (whatever that really is), to fix it.
Jeremy - You are using wp-cache on a 2.3.1 install of WP. I have seen that it is problematic on 2.3. Is it working well for you?
WP-cache is working fine for me. Then again I’ve manually disabled a lot of the extra crap in WP to speed it up and work with my setup and it wouldn’t surprise me if one of those things made it work correctly.
And yeah they’d have to rewrite a good chunk of WP to get it faster. It is getting much faster in recent versions (even a year ago it ran much slower) - but there is a lot to be desired. The main problem isn’t with too many MySQL queries - the problem is it loads probably 100 files every time it gets executed. That’s actually one big problem I’ve noticed with a lot of open source software - it can get quite bloaty if there aren’t people who do nothing but remove useless code. Basically what they need to do is stop adding new features for one revision and do nothing but optimize it and fix bugs.
Probably the single best way to speed up wordpress - besides using something like Wp-Cache - is to have your host install something to cache your PHP scripts - that’ll keep them from being recompiled every single time someone loads your site.
Ah yes - and Jonathan - the “gory” comment was, indeed, a compliment
Will: Hm, that is disheartening. The install of super cache seems to have done the site some good (at least no one here has said PT is moving slower) but it was very difficult and, as I said, it did bork the site for a while.
Now that I have it working I’m not going to remove it but I’m also going to not recommend it unless you know how to deal with server errors. I’ve been doing sites for 10 years and that stuff still spooks me.
I have to agree about the complaint regarding WP speed and the resolution for it. All of these plugins are just a stopgap.
Jeremy: What, open source software get slower? No way! Everyone knows that Firefox 2 is MUCH faster than 1.
Kidding aside, the problem is widespread. Linux has the same issue, look at the latest version of Ubuntu vs. the previous ones. That is why I’m back on Mac. Deleting code just isn’t as glamorous, or as easy, as adding so I guess it isn’t done as much.
How do you reward programmers for the code they don’t write?
And I am glad that it was a compliment, of course, even if it wasn’t I was going to take it as one anyway.
Ah yes - what’s up with the copyright 2.0 site? Seems like it has been down for a while.
WP-cache is working fine for me. Then again I’ve manually disabled a lot of the extra crap in WP to speed it up and work with my setup and it wouldn’t surprise me if one of those things made it work correctly.
And yeah they’d have to rewrite a good chunk of WP to get it faster. It is getting much faster in recent versions (even a year ago it ran much slower) - but there is a lot to be desired. The main problem isn’t with too many MySQL queries - the problem is it loads probably 100 files every time it gets executed. That’s actually one big problem I’ve noticed with a lot of open source software - it can get quite bloaty if there aren’t people who do nothing but remove useless code. Basically what they need to do is stop adding new features for one revision and do nothing but optimize it and fix bugs.
Probably the single best way to speed up wordpress - besides using something like Wp-Cache - is to have your host install something to cache your PHP scripts - that’ll keep them from being recompiled every single time someone loads your site.
Ah yes - and Jonathan - the “gory” comment was, indeed, a compliment
Will: Hm, that is disheartening. The install of super cache seems to have done the site some good (at least no one here has said PT is moving slower) but it was very difficult and, as I said, it did bork the site for a while.
Now that I have it working I’m not going to remove it but I’m also going to not recommend it unless you know how to deal with server errors. I’ve been doing sites for 10 years and that stuff still spooks me.
I have to agree about the complaint regarding WP speed and the resolution for it. All of these plugins are just a stopgap.
Jeremy: What, open source software get slower? No way! Everyone knows that Firefox 2 is MUCH faster than 1.
Kidding aside, the problem is widespread. Linux has the same issue, look at the latest version of Ubuntu vs. the previous ones. That is why I’m back on Mac. Deleting code just isn’t as glamorous, or as easy, as adding so I guess it isn’t done as much.
How do you reward programmers for the code they don’t write?
And I am glad that it was a compliment, of course, even if it wasn’t I was going to take it as one anyway.
Ah yes - what’s up with the copyright 2.0 site? Seems like it has been down for a while.
Jeremy: We talked about that on the podcast some, Chris has had a hosting issue as the provider he was using closed up shop. His Ruby sites are totally borked until he can get new hosting. I’m trying to get him to move in with me here at Media Temple but he doesn’t seem to be ready for that phase in our relationship.
Jeremy: We talked about that on the podcast some, Chris has had a hosting issue as the provider he was using closed up shop. His Ruby sites are totally borked until he can get new hosting. I’m trying to get him to move in with me here at Media Temple but he doesn’t seem to be ready for that phase in our relationship.
The site is loading quicker and is making things a lot simpler, thanks.
Recliners: Glad that it’s moving good for you. Hopefully it will stay that way!
The site is loading quicker and is making things a lot simpler, thanks.
Recliners: Glad that it’s moving good for you. Hopefully it will stay that way!