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.
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.
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.
I learned how to use page templates and built-in WordPress capabilities to remove more plugins and filtering.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Amazon’s Kindle Blog
