Spontaneous Derivation

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.

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). [↩]

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”

Goodbye old Simplicity (Sd edition) theme! You were a good one.

And helloooo hot red Kindle Love.

By the way, if you’re stopping by for the first time, say from The Last Colony Pimp thread on Whatever, here are three entries’ worth of pimpery for various writers.

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”

Photography: Dlade

I wanted to get this article out so anyone who doesn’t have a blog yet can get rolling with a little advice on that very basic of questions: where should I blog?

The big three these days are Blogger, LiveJournal, and Wordpress.

Here’s a run-down of their pros and cons.

Continue reading “Blogging for Writers, a Sneak Peek: Where Should I Blog?”

When I moved from Beta Blogger to Wordpress, I also switched domains¹.

This brought pain in two forms:

• broken backlinks from other sites, which isn’t good, and
• search engine penalties for duplicate content.

Neither were easily resolvable because of the differences between Wordpress and Blogger, and because Blogger is no more a real hosting solution than LiveJournal is.

Continue reading “Moving from Beta Blogger to Wordpress, Part 4: Holding Onto Backlinks”

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”