Terminally Incoherent

My blog tends to be a little bit slow at times. The reason for this is twofold:

1. I’m hosted on a shared box, along with a dozen other websites. We all share resources, and thus sometimes we can experience slowdowns. Especially if someone on my box gets slashdotted, digged, farked, borinboinged or etc.. We all suffer then. Although my host handled my site being digged wonderfully. I had a 100% uptime during the heaviest barrage so I was quite happy.
2. I’m using wordpress, which means that every page load = DB query + php parse + javascript magic.

There is not much I can do about #1. That is other than paying for dedicated host, which is not something I’m willing to do right now. But I can definitely cut down on the DB queries, and dynamic content to shave off few seconds per page load via caching.

Enter WP-Cache plugin - the latest and greatest in Wordpress optimization. I set the cache to expire after 20 minutes for now. The default setting is an hour, but I was a little worried that the static content might get a little stale and etc… I might increase it later.

Anyways, if you notice any weird things going on with the blog, let me know. I’m mainly worried about stuff like the feeds not updating in a timely manner, and people’s comments not showing up immediately after posting. If you notice that, shoot me an email, or leave a comment in this post and I will see what can I do about this.

I already noticed small speedup on subsequent loads of the main page so this might work out really nicely.

In the past I used to have allot of traffic from Technorati. This has changed when I moved over to wordpress. I registered the new blog with the site, and when I did specific keyword searches terminally-incoherent.com showed up here and there. But despite that, the incoming traffic from there dropped down to zero recently.

I guess that since I stopped tagging my posts, I no longer show up in their tag indexes. That kinda sucks. So I decided to get back some of the technorati traffic and installed the SimpleTags plugin that should allow me to easily include technorati tags at the end of my posts.

As you can see below, it works like a charm

I am very lazy and forgetful when it comes to my browsing habits. If a website does not have an RSS feed, I’m not going to be a regular there. It’s just to tedious to actually go to some silly site and check for updates every day. There are quite a few web comics out there that I would love to follow, but they do not publish RSS. In effect, I rarely visit them, and I do not keep up with the story/jokes.

Same is with comments. Sometimes I stumble onto some interesting blog, and post a comment. But I very rarely go back to see if the author commented anything back. This seems to be the case with everyone. Often I get a comment from someone who randomly stumbled onto my blog via Google or Technorati. But these people rarely stick around. Usually they post a single comment, and never come back.

So I decided I need to fix this. You can now automatically subscribe to the comments when you post them. Just check that little box below the text area, and you are good You will get an email notification to the address you entered when someone else replies to that same post.

You can also go back and un-subscribe at any time. Pretty neat eh? Wordpress is like the Firefox of blogging tools - there is a freakin plugin for everything. If you have a Wordpress blog, I highly recommend Subscribe to Comments 2.0.

I just read an excellent post on how to migrate from Blogger to wordpress. It piqued my interest because I recently did just that. I moved my blogspot hosted blog, to wordpress on a paid host. So this was right up my alley.

What is really cool about Tom Sherman’s migration method, is that figured out a clever way to redirect hits from your old blog to your new one. In other words, if someone finds a link to your old blogspot post and clicks on it he/she will be immediately redirected to the same post on your wordpress blog. It is quite ingenious in it’s simplicity.

You modify your Blogger template to include a simple redirect, and then you use some PHP magic to handle all redirected hits. The whole thing is maybe like 10 lines long, and it works great.

So, if you recently moved from Blogger to wordpress I highly recommend checking this out.

One thing that was driving me absolutely nuts about wordpress was lack of any kind of support for daylight savings time. By default, you set up your time zone as offset from GMT. I live on the East Coast so for me this is EST which is GMT-5. However, due to daylight bullshit time, I’m actually about a hour off from EST.

Now, I could easily adjust this to show correct time, but that’s a major PITA! Every time we roll the clock back or push it forward, I would have to log into Wordpress and change my offset. That is just stupid.

Fortunately, there are plugins to fix this. I just downloaded the TimeZone Plugin by Kimmo Suominen and it is working great! For the first time ever, I am posting from the correct time zone! Wohoo!

Note, by default the plugin uses the default TimeZone of your server. Since it seems that my host is located in what seems to be frakin East Bumblefuck, I had to manually specify my time zone as America/New_York. After you set that up, you are good to go!