Spontaneous Derivation

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. [↩]

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). [↩]

Some plugins don’t make the most of the new hierarchical categories in WordPress (well… new since 2.1 anyways). Most plugins that fashion their own SQL queries take only a single level of a category hierarchy into account.

For example: my blog Spontaneous Derivation, has this partial category hierarchy underneath Fantasy and SF category:

Fantasy and SF [id 1]
+-- Awards     [id 2]
+-- News       [id 3]
+-- Reviews    [id 4]

Most plugins, when asked to work on category 1, will neglect to include the posts under ids 2, 3, and 4; yet all posts in the child categories implicitly belong to the parent category 1.

Here’s how to add hierarchical category support to these plugins, under the cut.

Continue reading “Using Hierarchical Categories in Wordpress Plugins”

Photography: .parker.

Life is short, and blogging takes time.

Say you’re oncall (like I am currently). Do you really want to spend your two hours of free internet time a day doing annoying blog odd jobs and maintenance that ought to just be easy—or do you want to spend it doing research and writing? I know what any sane blogger would say.

Here are five WordPress plugins that are giving me more time now, during a couple weeks when I shall be very short on time indeed.

Continue reading “5 WordPress Plugins That Make Life Easier”

Out of the box, a Wordpress install is missing key features that even Beta Blogger had. Things like comment previews. Tag editing. Being able to redirect your site feed to Feedburner. Little things like that.

You could spend hours trying to find all the right plugins.

To keep you from spending time like I did, so that you can get down to the business of blogging in comfort, here’s my suggested list of:

• 6 Plugins you need
• 6 Plugins that show off Wordpress
• 6 More plugins

Continue reading “Moving from Beta Blogger to Wordpress, Part 3: Plugins and Little Things”