Spontaneous ∂erivation

I love him so.

There are quite a few people upset at the House of Representatives’ Republican behavior with respect to the bill. All that wasted talk and compromise from Obama, seems to be the general thought on the left side of the line.

But I’m not upset, despite liking the bill.

First of all, it’s the House of Representatives. The House is like the LiveJournal community of the U.S. Government. I’d have been deeply impressed if the Stimulus Package vote had gone down without some kind of high school melodrama.

Secondly, the Republicans seem to have forgotten the rules to the blood sport of Washington. Yes, you can indeed ignore the rules of reciprocation and trust when you’re in the clear majority. But when you aren’t the majority, it’s easier to accumulate political debt than political interest.

Put plainly: Obama, by visiting the Hill rather than staying put in the White House, and having all of these successful talks with the Republicans, more or less invested his available political coinage (of which he has quite a bit of, being as popular as he is with the country right now). He gave the opportunity to the Republicans to do the same. But instead of investing, they decided to spend what little coinage they had left in cock-blocking the bill (and especially the way they spun it to the media).

This might have been worth something were they able to actually get something in return, like actually blocking the bill; but they didn’t and indeed they couldn’t. Obama’s investment, on the other hand, paid him dividends. He had little risk, which is not the same as having little to risk, which is what the House Republicans have. And thus Obama played his hand well, much better than most Presidents would have done, I think.

So, House Republicans: they’ve effectively blown their political brokerage account. They didn’t actually incur debt, because Obama came to them; they just cleaned themselves out with little leverage left to actually build up their accounts again. Such accounts do eventually gain interest as the memory of the public fades, but for the near future, Obama has them dead to rights.

And, you know. It wouldn’t be LiveJournal the House of Representatives without a little soap opera floating around.

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.

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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). [↩]