Spontaneous Derivation

There’s been a bit of fuss made over Seth Godin’s interview with HarperStudio about free content and how it can help publishing.¹

Oh, let’s go right ahead and say it: Seth Godin advocates the idea that spreading ideas is more important than money:

[Publishers are] in the business of leveraging the big ideas authors have. There are a hundred ways to do that, yet book publishers obsess about just one or two of them. Here’s the news flash: that’s not what authors care about. Authors don’t care about units sold. They care about ideas spread.

As you can imagine, this led to some hue and cry.² Many writers write for money. It’s how they make their living (in some cases, how they wish they could make all of their living). And heck. I feel that way too.

But there’s some context missing here that may not be obvious to writers of a more normal bent. And that’s Seth Godin is a blogger. Not just any blogger, for many writers blog these days; he’s a professional blogger, and also a highly successful one. His brand sells, and the way he made his brand was through his blog. And not only does it sell his blog (and its ad space), and his online writing, but also his offline writing, his books.

And he started out with nothing. No one knew who the hell Seth Godin was nor cared, until they discovered that his content was what they wanted and needed.

Now, there’s a conceit among bloggers that through hard work you can achieve anything³, a sort of American Dream of Blogging. But it’s also a matter of selection of subject, quality of writing and content, and as always, moving with the zeitgeist. Seth Godin hit quadruple aces on all three. Obviously some of this he controls, and some of it he does not.

Nevertheless, his brand was based on free content, freely given (albeit copyright held). What many writers forget is that, at one point, they also started out with free content, freely given (albeit copyright held, most of the time). For instance, your manuscript is submitted to agents and editors without them paying you if they don’t like it or need it—although there is a distinct difference since the audience is restricted to agents and editors. If a writer started as a fan fiction writer, they also gave out content for free.⁴ And when we’re still older, we give away stories and books to people so they know who we are.

The point is that we don’t give everything away completely gratis⁵. And as an addendum to that point, what we do give away, we give away because we’re brand-building (even submitting manuscripts is, in essence, brand-building with a more limited audience).

And that’s what Seth Godin is trying to say. You need to spread your ideas and your brand so that people know who you are, before you can make money. This is, incidentally, why marketing is so important in publishing, and indeed it’s why you go with a publisher in the first place if you’re not as efficient, whether through subject matter or luck or skill, as Seth is at brand-building.

What Seth is also suggesting is that a free content approach is more appropriate these days. When he compares books to music, people are correct in pointing out that this is apples to oranges; what they forget is that apples and oranges are both fruit. Books are information as much as music is; indeed, you could argue that books are more coherent information. People have far less patience and if they can sample a kind of information for free, they’re much more likely to buy future work from said author or musician. The interwebs will not wait for you. You must prove yourself.

At the same time, you need to be wise about balancing truly free content, free but paid-for content, and content that people pay for. Playing these against each other is how bloggers work and make money.

Now is where people will demand, “so when does it actually work?”

It’s worked for Seth Godin, obviously. It’s worked for Cory Doctorow. It’s even worked for John Scalzi. On a much, much smaller scale, it’s even worked for me⁶, and if I want to and have the time and the desire and the drive, I can actually build from there.

The thing to remember about bloggers who make money is that most of them are insane. That kind of drive, when you’re not getting paid and often for years⁷ , is the kind of drive you need to maybe make a blog that pays you; otherwise you don’t get anything, even with the zeitgeist.

Mind you, the writers who make money are also insane. I think, actually, you have to be pretty nuts to make money from words, because they take a lot of effort to come up with, especially good ones.⁸

Anyways: such is where Seth Godin is coming from. Money is nice, but ideas spread is necessary to get money, and ideas spread widely is necessary to make lots of money, and one way to do the latter is to give away content for free in our busy-ADD-internet-super-connected-with-pirates-anyways world.

1. Hat tip to Andrew Wheeler, since I was only peripherally aware of this. [↩]
2. Why yes, I do tend towards understatement. Why do you ask? [↩]
3. Indeed, like most bloggers who are extremely successful, Seth has been blogging for years [↩]
4. Ignoring the really illegal cases where they try to sell work not in the public domain and that they don’t have license to. [↩]
5. Ads. Paid-for but released for free content. Etc. [↩]
6. Caveat that I am very much aware of: in no way can I be considered at all either a successful writer or blogger, and if you want to point out that you are much better than me for being published in more real places than just Tor.com, and anyways I shouldn’t be using Tor.com as a resume due to my general lack of worth and weight in the field, I will simply bow my head and say: you are entirely correct, sir or madam; I am not as worthy or as good as you, and I did say “much, much smaller scale”. Yet even peasants can advise kings, if only because they have the time and are close enough to the ground to make some observations, which may or may not hold up, but nevertheless, some which may prove useful to our betters. [↩]
7. I’ll note that some people will say, “But there are bloggers that make money in months!” To which I note that such bloggers usually have a high level of experience in the area which they blog, which itself takes years to accomplish, so the story is incomplete if you simply look at their history as beginning when they first landed on Blogger or whatever. [↩]
8. Cue argument from folks who argue there are people who write bad words and still make money. I count ideas as part of writing, so unless you’re actually prepared to write a celebrity biography—and trust me, it’s sometimes really not worth it—or put your neck out and write anyways even if your words do not float like delicate swans in a lavendar-hued pool while the sun sets over the misty winter snow—I don’t think this is a great argument. [↩]

A lot of people freak out when they wake up in the morning and see that their subscriber numbers have hit 0. Or their site statistics.

This is what you need to know about the wonders (and non-wonders) of Feedburner. Putting the rest of this article under the fold since it descends into geekery.

Continue reading “A Short Post to People Freaking Out About Feedburner”

And we’re back to a non-election style for the wondrous Simple Balance theme, which is easy to style and yet still easy to configure through a set of bodacious options offered in its configuration page.

You know, I’ve been having fun contemplating Simple Balance styles for winter.

Of course, the fun isn’t limited to YouTube (which we’ll return to as well). College Humor regularly puts together well-produced skits and shorts.

Like this instant Election ‘08 classic:

I first became aware of College Humor through their hilarious Font Conference video.

Yes, it is! And it’s a book review! Of a Terry Pratchett book! With footnotes!¹

This is the first time I’ve ever written a review of a certain… quality. I’m familiar with doing short reviews, the kind that go on a blog and enthuse! when you’re trying to blog up a storm. They’re fun but they can be a little shallow, even if you enthuse! for 400 words.

Most bloggers do that. I’ve seen reviews at 20 words. That’s fine and all, but it’s not the kind of review I can exactly put up at Tor.com. While it is a blog, it’s also a blog for a company, so technically I’m now a professional blogger.

So now I need to add in more context and craft and themes, y’know, go into significant detail about why the book is great² without going into full plot synopsis, which is about the worst thing you can do in a review. It’s boring as hell. I banged my head against the wall a good long time³ before I managed to get something out that encompassed the first two but ditched the last.

I’m actually proud that I didn’t need an editor to tell me that. Although I did wander over to Miss Snark’s to see what she had to say about good book reviews. She’s very to the point. I love her. Good old Miss Snark.⁴

In the informal world of blogging, people may ask why the hell would you do that?

I write to be read. Which means I try to reach. Even in my short reviews I always try to cover a little craft, a little context, blah blah, but I’ve always been lazy on them compared to my other posts because reviews are much harder for me. Much harder.

In other words, Twittering on the Global Frequency wasn’t unusual, and is the kind of post that usually gets my blog Stumbled. I’m good at that kind of thing, except when I over-reach (after all, that’s why I’m not writing about meta-blogging anymore). In other words, I’m good at writing about and learning about blogging; I suck at reading for comprehension. I have to read books twice before I can write even a short review with context.⁵

Fortunately, Tor.com gets me reaching. It’s not strictly a pay thing; if I’m writing for pay, I want to write something I’m proud of and that people will look at and say, woah, that chick deserves to be on Tor.com. I come into the game with zero credits, so I must earn some.

And all this gives you guys decent reviews and decent articles. I could actually reel back my dedication to the blog articles over there. I could just blast out my post about vampires: the demon lovers right now, with nothing fancy but stark and direct words. That would be enough.

But I can’t do that. It’s not me. I didn’t even do that on my own blog for the stuff that I knew I could hitch up in quality, and when you wander off and write things like this for free⁶, you are a sick person.

I write to be read. It’s not about gaining audience any way I can. It’s about gaining an audience that wants to read my words. And for me, that’s been very clearly about quality; for others, it can be humor or philosophy or whatnot instead. There are useful things to learn from social media when it gets applied to your blog; that is definitely one of them.

1. Those were really fun to do. I can see why he does them. You can add deeper asides that don’t interrupt the flow of the article/review/narrative/whatever. Like a discussion of Small Gods. Or this one. [↩]
2. Or, you know, not. Hopefully I’ll keep running into great books to blog. [↩]
3. Which is why, mine editors, you did not see a Thursday post. And might not see a post this Thursday, even though mining the values of Tuesdays and especially Thursdays is something that my blogger mind is strongly attuned to, as waves of the ocean might to oysters. Or… something. [↩]
4. I never did figure out who she was. Doubt I ever will. [↩]
5. As you can imagine, this slows me down somewhat when it comes to learning to write via reading, but I think that reading is the most important part of learning to write. After all, it’s reading and digesting that got me into the position to actually blog about certain topics well. So many people ignore this in favor of getting words out, which if you’re starving is fine, but if you’re not writing for your supper, like me, it’s kind of silly. [↩]
6. Not even ads. Do you know what HTML for Dummies would have netted me on a blog that paid decently per ad view? I could have paid my mortgage for one month. [↩]

I cleared out all the widget caches¹ and reloaded the page to regenerate them all.

Total load time for the front page, all widgets, and also the WP Widget Cache writing them to disk:

86 queries. 1.314 seconds.

Total load time for the front page and just WP Widget Cache reading the widgets from disk (no individual widget cache has yet expired:

45 queries. 0.191 seconds.

The queries have pretty much been cut in half, and the load time cut down in much more than that. Sometimes the number of queries/load time increases a little, because some of the widgets have expired their cache and thus must be regenerated, but otherwise the page just loads quickly.

WP Widget Cache: made of win.

1. I’d added the new widget from Twitscoop. It’s in an iframe, and thus the executing Javascript inside doesn’t add to the load time of my page. That’s different from straight Javascript widgets, like Google Reader or the Twitter badge; the naked Javascript executes and blocks your page load. In other words, iframes rock with respect to this kind of thing—unless you need the generated HTML to match your theme, in which case, not so much. [↩]

I decided to run some speed tests, after speeding up Spontaneous Derivation. You’ll note that S∂ still has quite a few plugins enabled.

My domain has a couple other sites on it, so I decided to run a speed test on all three.

Without further ado: the contestants!

The Speed Test

We’re using iWebTool’s Website Speed Test and running the three against each other six times (since that’s the number of times the tool can be run without a paid account in an hour, and I didn’t feel like wasting more time…).

The results of each run:

Spontaneous Derivation

Size: 212.54 KB of HTML
Six Runs:

Total time (s)		Average: s/KB
2.63				0.01
2.52				0.01
1.15				0.01
1.12				0.01
1.16				0.01
1.07				0.01

Average total run time: 1.61 seconds
Average seconds per KB: 0.01 seconds

Holmesian Derivations

Size: 23.65 KB of HTML
Six Runs:

Total time (s)		Average: s/KB
0.52				0.02
0.53				0.02
0.52				0.02
0.52				0.02
0.59				0.02
0.52				0.02
0.53				0.02

Average total run time: 0.53 seconds
Average seconds per KB: 0.02 seconds

Fictional Derivations

Size: 37.94 KB of HTML
Six Runs:

Total time (s)		Average: s/KB
1.59				0.04
2.26				0.06
1.61				0.04
1.61				0.04
1.67				0.04
0.54				0.01

Average total run time: 1.55 seconds
Average seconds per KB: 0.04 seconds

Comparisons

Holmesian Derivations performed the best overall, reliably downloading in half of a second each time. Even on a KB per KB basis, it’s still only 0.2 seconds per KB. It had the least to render.

Fictional Derivations performed second best, with an average run time of 1.55 seconds. Its speed was slowest (0.4 seconds per KB), and while it had more to render, it was only 14 KB more. That’s an egregiously long time, but is probably mostly due to 10 posts versus only 5.

Spontaneous Derivation was the slowest at an average of 1.61 seconds to download. However, S∂ also had the most to render by far—nearly 9 times more than Holmesian Derivations, and 5.5 times more than Fictional Derivations. Its speed was by far the fastest—0.01 s/KB.

Conclusions

Now, this is a really informal and totally unstrict benchmark test, so conclusions are pretty fluffy to draw.

However, S∂ performed the best in terms of getting its content out, if not in terms of how much it needed to get out there. Holmesian Derivations was the trimmest, but with a worse speed than S∂.

What if S∂ was running with WP Super Cache, too? Who knows? I don’t want to try; this was mostly for fun. But realistically speaking, S∂ should have taken much longer—and it would have, were it not for WP Widget Cache.

So I will say this: WP Widget Cache rules the house when it comes to not performing expensive queries and not pulling down and re-parsing RSS XML on every single load.

Best. Plugin. Ever.

Speeding Up Your Blog

Because it’s been annoying me more than usual, I want to keep this theme because I don’t need to waste time trying to get another one up to speed, and I’m going to be on a shared host for some time to come (thank you, economic downturn).

You might not need to do this (I personally am obsessive). Indeed, it takes some time and knowledge to do some of the more serious items on this list.

General Approach

1. I killed every plugin I didn’t absolutely need, especially the ones that add more filtering execution time to my posts. They’re usually the ones with special tags/short codes.

2. I learned how to use page templates and built-in WordPress capabilities to remove more plugins and filtering.

3. WP Widget Cache is awesome. I can include some of the more expensively queried widgets (blogroll and categories) and automatically achieve caching on my RSS widgets. That cuts the number of queries my front page needs in half while keeping interesting parts around.

4. Since my RSS widgets are now cached with the WP Widget Cache, I killed every widget containing Javascript, which always hit some service remotely and never cache.

5. I removed as many plugins as possible that require cron jobs (e.g. regular executions of something or other), especially if they hit my site often (which is how WordPress cron jobs usually work).

6. I used to have redundant website metrics trackers for my site (they all tell you different things). No more; I’ve settled on Mint.¹

Below the cut: stuff I kept, stuff I dropped, detailed reasons why, and replacements if applicable. This list is long, but there are some interesting plugins listed down there.

Continue reading “Speeding Up Your Wordpress Blog”

1. For people interested in free, and who wouldn’t be, yet still want live statistics rather than Google Analytics‘ delayed statistics, look into Woopra or WordPress.com Stats (which also work for independent sites). [