Lijit Search

Housekeeping: Site Improvements

By Jonathan Bailey • Jan 3rd, 2008 • Category: Articles, Housekeeping

With some extra time at New Year’s, I took the chance to make some site overhauls and improvements, the last of which were finished last night.

The biggest update was the removal of a plugin that was putting a heavy load on the database server. Though it is unlikely that non-commenting users noticed this due to my use of the Super Cache plugin, it was causing the database to take longer to load articles and even was putting a strain on my host.

Unfortunately the plugin in question was the one I used to improve the search functionality so, for the moment, I am back to the default WordPress search engine. I will probably wind up replacing the site search engine with Google in the coming days as it is what I use to search my own site.

I am loathe to do that for many reasons, but the default WordPress search engine simply does not work effectively.

Comments Changes

Commenters may have noticed that I disabled the reCATPCHA plugin last night. The reason isn’t to stop using it, but to give Defensio a real test.

Earlier, during the trackback spam attack, the staff there asked me to give the service a shake once things settled down for them. Since they haven’t had any issues in a while and recently released an update on their plugin, I decided to give it a try and have disabled reCAPTCHA to see how it works.

I’ll provide updates on that as I have a better idea of the effectiveness.

Other Updates

I updated several other plugins, most of them behind the scenes but two to watch out far are the contact form, which a few people said was not working, and the comment edit feature of the site. Both plugins, Comment Form 7 and WP Ajax Edit Comments had updates and they have been installed.

Please let me know if you have any problems with them.

Twitter Changes

After the recent Twitter outage I switched my sidebar widget to Jaiku. However, I’ve switched it back to Twitter after realizing I have absolutely no friends on Jaiku and a growing presence on Twitter.

If anyone wants to follow me on Twitter, my username there is PlagiarismToday.

Theme Changes

Finally, though I haven’t made any changes yet, I am strongly considering making some changes to the look and feel of this site. Namely, I’m wanting to create a new theme so that I can better highlight important content including the “Stopping Internet Plagiarism” series, popular articles and other key pieces.

The current theme really doesn’t give me much chance to do that and I’m looking for any advice. I’m checking out the usual theme resources but have not seem much to work with and I’ve sent out a few feelers to theme developers.

I’d be very interested to hear what your thoughts on this are and what you would like to see from any new theme that is used. I certainly don’t want to change things too much, but some rearrangement is in order.

Thank you in advance for your input!

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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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Viewing 6 Comments

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    You might want to consider our site search service. We offer an alternative site search to google's hosted site search solution.

    Please take a look at www.JiansNet.com and let me know how you think.

    Thanks,

    Jian
    www.JiansNet.com
    Quality Site Search with Affordable price
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    I am not very clued in on the technology so, half the things you talk about goes over my head. I like to read your posts and where I can intelligently make a comment, do so. So far, I have had no problems with either of that. So, I doubt that I can offer any serious advise. I like things on your site the way they are.

    I do have one comment and that is I still find that your site takes longer to load than some others that I visit regularly. On the other hand, there are some that take longer than yours and I have informed the owners of the same.
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    Jonathan,
    I have been using advanced search (the lite version). It's an excellent search engine, but I'm not sure how much of a drag it would be on the database. You have to install both, but I only activate the lite. It's at http://www.zirona.com/software/wordpress-advanc...
    (GNU GPL license)
    I've also recently found another plugin, In Series (at WordPress plugins database), that keeps posts together with a TOC and other stuff if they're in a series. Might want to investigate that.
    About your theme, well, can't help you there, but you definitely need a new one. This one, while clean and simple, really doesn't leave you much play room for what you want. Good luck.
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    Sue:


    Thank you for the excellent tip on Advanced Search. I am so loathe to use Google (and pass my search traffic on to them) that I am going to download it and set it up this afternoon.

    I'll check out the In Series one too. However, from what you said, it sounds like my Relates Posts plugin might be doing much of that already. Still worth checking into.

    And thanks for the feedback on the theme, it's the kind of encouragement I need to get off my rear and fix this thing!
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    I also use the related posts plugin, but find it to not always work too well. And this is the one that checks the content, not just the titles. In Series seems to allow the serial posts to be placed on a single page if you like, and I will be trying that out as soon as I finish the particular series I'm doing on one of my sites. And you control which posts are linked together. Good luck on the theme hunt. There are so many great ones out there, I find myself wanting to start new blogs just so I can use them. I have a whole folder filled with these excellent themes. Just found a new one today to play with. :)
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    Sue:

    I'll probably try the new search plugin in just a bit. The related posts plugin seems to work decently for me, but then again, I'm pretty dull with titles. Most sites aren't quite as predictable as PT in that area.

    Definitely let me know what you think of that serial plugin though, sounds interesting. I could use it on a few of my serials.

    I think I've got the theme and I'm getting ready to launch the beta later today. I've already shot it out over my Twitter some. However, my problem wasn't that I had too many good themes to choose from. Quite the opposite really.

    It seems, to me, there are a handful of very good theme designers and hundreds of people who just want easy backlinks.

    I almost paid for a professional theme.

    Do let me know what you think of the beta when it goes live!

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