Jonathan Wijaya Loe's blog » wp

Matt Mullenweg speaks about Improving Web Performance

Jonathan Loe — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 06:15:56 +0000

Interesting and quite a coincidence I must say, to see another thought about web performance by Matt Mullenweg as recently I posted several posts about web performance: Web Performance Best Practices and One-Cent Tips to Increase Site Performance. For anyone who doesn’t know who is Matt Mullenweg, read more about him from Wikipedia. In short, he is the co-founder of a well-known software most bloggers used – WordPress, and also a young entrepreneur living in San Fransisco. You may also want to check his blog.

There is a video of his recent talk in a technology conference where he spoke about how web performance is important and also shared his experience on handling these issues, mainly about his experiences in WordPress and how the need for speed is really important.

Matt first talked about how WordPress handles the 404 – aka Not Found page – causes a lot of performance overhead due to the fact that the 404 page generated by WordPress is apparently database driven, unlike other static 404 pages. Matt also talked about how easy for developer to create a WordPress plug-in and how these millions of plug-ins can contribute to the performance issue by introducing redundancies: multiple and identical javascript file inclusions in the HTML header. Therefore WordPress created a new function for plug-in developers as a way to eliminate these redundancies.

He also spoke about how a millisecond can save time of people around the world collectively. He took a real example of his website WordPress.com where millions of bloggers have been using as their blog sites and explained how a small performance efficiency or improvement can indirectly promote a more eco-friendly environment: saving servers processing time thus less power consumption.

Interesting issue he raised is also on his experience when WordPress made a total revamp of its user interface and apparently they faced a lot of issues when viewed on Internet Explorer which I believe most web developers have been having as a painful and frustrating task which we are forced to conform .

He also highlighted a few times on his favourite quote by Joe Clark that reads “We’ve upped our standards, up yours” which was coined at the beginning of the adoption of web standards. Anyway, check the video below for a full coverage of his talk.

Typogriph the Minimal WordPress theme

Jonathan Loe — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 08:48:33 +0000

Obvious enough, I just changed my theme from Fusion to a cleaner and lightweight theme called Typogriph as I had been looking around for a simple yet nice theme that suits my need. And finally came down to Typogriph as my best choice. There may be other popular theme called Thesis which most notable bloggers have been using but unfortunately this theme doesn’t come for free. It is priced at $87 for personal use and $164 for developer’s option. You can check the price in detail here.

The stuff that I like about this theme are:

Minimalist

Typogriph has a clean and minimal look and feel which hopefully results in more lightweight pages in order to give a faster loading and browsing experience – without relying so much on catchy images as well as heavy style sheet to appeal your readers.

Just a Switch

Changing to Typogriph from Fusion is just like pressing a switch. There was no hassle or other settings to make your pages to work correctly. With my activated plug-ins and just one or two tweaks to my AdSense widgets and there I have it, my new theme.

Fluid

Typogriph is a fluid theme which means that it makes full use of reader’s browser real estate and automatically adjusted when re-sized. This is definitely beneficial to meet various screen resolutions.

Browser Compatibility

Tested to render well across various browsers like Firefox, IE (6, 7, 8), Apple Safari, and Google Chrome.

On the contrary Typogriph does not render your page links well if you have pages as sub of other pages. The links were a mess so I had to fix that by moving sub pages as parent pages to quickly solve it. And everything else was acceptable and I love the arrangement of the widgets on the front page that showcases all my desired widgets, recent comments, and most popular posts.

In case you’re interested to explore other minimalist themes. Here are the sites I stumbled to.

So how you feel about this theme? Let me know

Retiring Snap Shots™ Plugin for WordPress.org

Jonathan Loe — Fri, 22 May 2009 17:18:11 +0000

Well, first I felt sorry about retiring this plugin since Snap Shots™ was my first plugin I first installed on the first day of blogging. Thought it was fun and eye-candy. But on the other hand I realized that Snap Shots is kinda bloated in a sense that it makes your page loading heavy and thus slow. However this doesn’t mean that Snap Shots is not good for your site. I guess this is primarily because number of my wordpress plugins increases over time. Yeah it’s my bad for having bundle of “toys” in my wordpress – my apology.

As a compensation I am going to explain my rationale for removing Snap Shots plugin. First, Snap Shots uses JavaScript to display the snapshot of the url you’re about to visit. And the script being used doesn’t actualy reside on your server but resides in Snap Shots server(s) instead, which means that your browser needs to retrieve the script from their server(s) for the Snap Shots to function properly. As a result, your blog now becomes dependant on those servers. Experienced Google uptime glitch lately? What if Snap Shots servers were down? then your blog will be crippled without Snap Shots. Although at least not paralyzed.

Well to help you better picture the former explanation, lets take a simple example. Say you wish to rent a costume for a Halloween party but your favourite costume rental shop was closed due to unknown circumstances. As a result you wouldn’t able to show up to the fullest without the costume that you’ve planned before. I’m sure you would feel “crippled”. The same notion for blog.

Having said that, bloggers can still benefit something from Snap Shots as explained in my other post, provided the former case doesn’t occur often. So if you’re a new blogger, hope this post can help you make your decision.

Ways to Publicize Your Personal Blog

Jonathan Loe — Wed, 13 May 2009 06:05:44 +0000

Introduction

As a new blogger I always hope I could draw more readers to drop by my site at the same time increase my site traffic or in marketing term “increase your branding”. However I realise I’ll be competing with millions notable bloggers out there and this is not an easy task. Here, I believe my patience and persistence are being challenged. So, if you’re up to this challenge I will share some guidance on where and how to start. But do take note though that there is no guarantee that my guidance will definitely do the magic.

To start off, I believe that first you have to begin with your own blog – get yourself ready first. It’s just like constructing your home or house: first you start with building a strong foundation and thereafter you can easily stack up your block. Once you think you’re ready to go, then you start publicizing your blog with confidence.

I must admit these guides are not totally created by my own, instead I collated based on other sources I found, along with my own intuition. I’ve separated the guidance into two: What to prepare and How to publicize.

Prepare your Blog

Timeless is Everlasting

Means do write posts that will be readable in a year or more. A constructive and useful post may not immediately catch readers’ attention (just as this post) but sees it in long-term view. Personally, I know that there are millions posts out there with the same topic as mine, but here I did not think of marketing this post but instead regarding this as my future reference.

Create Sitemap

Sitemap (or a site map), according to Wikipedia, is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users as this helps search engine bots to find pages on your site. For WordPress user, you can easily achieve this by installing a plugin called “Google XML Sitemaps” mentioned in other post. Think of sitemap as shortcuts for search engine bots.

SEO Compliant

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. What does this mean? This means that any websites including your blog has to be SEO compliant in order for search engines out there (like Google) can easily index your pages and return your pages when people search. Again, a WordPress plugin called “All in One SEO Pack” is the magic wand.

More Ping Services

This may be the simplest one to do. In WordPress what you need to do is go to “Settings > Writing” and look for the ping list text-area and add more ping services into the box. This is to notify the ping service providers when you published a new post. You can easily find a long list of them from Google or you may refer to my sources below.

Be Opportunist

As opposed to my previous point, if you think there’s a very interesting topic that may grab some-one’s attention immediately, do attempt. Short announcement may be a short-term branding selling strategy.

Be Social

Give social readers option to promote your post if they like it. These readers may come from other sites, like twitter, stumbleupon, digg, technorati, and alot more. In WordPress, a plugin “Add to Any” will help you fill the job for free and hassle-free.

Be Smart

Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not talking about how you dress here instead how to dress your blog. Impress your readers with unexpected catch. Fortunately in WordPress you can easily fulfill this with the power of plug-ins. Kindly refer to this post for the list.

OK, that’s my last point on what you need to do first with your blog. Next thing is to start to publicize your blog.

Publicize your Blog

Submit to Blog and RSS Directory

First is to submit your blog – tell your existence. Blog and RSS directory provides a catalog of blogs or posts for readers to find on a specific topic or category. Submitting to these directories will definitely help you climb up the ladder in search engine results too because these directories may be more popular and therefore make your blog quickly recognised.

Contribute

Make contributions to other blog posts. Contribution doesn’t mean to dig out your pity pocket and donate, instead post your comments to the blog posts if you find it interesting and useful. Give kudos to the authors for their hard work in sharing their ideas.

Be Proactive

Join free Internet community out there, namely facebook, twitter, technorati, digg, stumbleupon and many more, and market your blog in your profile. These communities grows bigger and faster than you could imagine.

Appreciate and Respect

Appreciation and respect are what people always look out for in office, and even in your daily life. And here in cyberspace, the same rules apply. If you post a topic in your blog with sources from other blog, do include the URL to their site in your post to allow pingback/trackback – a way to notify the author your token of appreciation. As a result they feel encouraged and may post more stuff for your feed.

My One Cent

Lastly just my one cent, always think outside the box because I’m pretty sure you can do better than my above list which may be less effective as time lapses. And also keep in mind that this virtual space will always evolve, just like our life.

Hope you find this useful and I welcome your feedback or help me complete the list. Don’t forget to leave your rating or comment below. Thanks and Cheers!

Sources