Tag: php Posts

Configuring WordPress And Nginx

WordPress

After my recent mention on Reddit last week, I decided to try and improve the responsiveness of my little DigitalOcean VPS even more than it already was. I was definitely happy that I was able to withstand almost 20,000 visitors in just a few hours, but thought I might be able to improve things further by switching from Apache to Nginx. I debated it a long time ago, but never made the plunge for a few different reasons. First, I typically used hosting services based on cPanel. From what I gather, cPanel doesn’t really work well with Nginx (or at all), so that was never really an option. And second, I could never quite figure out how to set up WordPress and Nginx properly so that they worked nicely together. It’s slightly more complicated because I often use W3 total cache, and it normally places its configuration into .htaccess for […]

5 Ways To Speed Up Your WordPress Website

WordPress

I’ve recently been optimizing a few different WordPress websites, and wanted to share with everyone some of the easy ways to speed up your WordPress website. Some of these tips are intended for server administrators and assume that you have root access to your server and/or cPanel/WHM (if you’re using cPanel). Other tips are intended for any WordPress website administrator. This article has 5 different tips for how to speed up your WordPress website. If you currently don’t have a WordPress website but are considering setting one up, here is information on how to setup a WordPress blog. Install a Caching Plugin Applies To: WordPress Administators Whenever a user views your website on a default WordPress installation, your webserver, which is often a program called Apache, will load all the PHP scripts for WordPress, compile them, execute the scripts, access all your content in the MySQL database, and ultimately send […]

Five Months Without C++

 Journal

I spent the last five years pretty much exclusively coding in C++. Strangely enough, I haven’t really touched a C++ compiler since leaving Vancouver, and instead have been pretty much coding non-stop in PHP. Obviously C++ is a compiled language, and PHP is an interpreted one. In terms of enjoyment, I think I like the challenge of coming up with cool C++ code, but without a doubt, PHP is far more enjoyable overall. The main reason, at least for me, is because I can write some code and instantly see the results of that code in PHP. With C++, you have to compile your code, and even with incremental linking, it can take you a while before you can actually execute your program. The last C++ code base I worked on was probably on the order of 400,000 lines of code, and made use of about 10 third party libraries. […]

Viper Cache Nearly Done

 Journal

I spent some time working on Viper Cache last night. It’s going to get a new name at some point, but it’s close to being done. I’m going to test it on this site for a while and see if I can iron out any bugs.

Rimu Hosting Update

 Journal

So I’ve had my website on Rimu for over a week now, and so far things are going quite well. I’ve actually had a few support requests in with them, mostly trivial items, and they’ve answered everything in about 30 minutes, which is great. The one thing I’ve found out is that their base plan (which only included 160 MB of memory) just isn’t powerful enough to run more than a small WordPress site. I spent a bunch of time reducing the memory requirements of Apache and MySQL, but my efforts just weren’t successful. Every once and a while an application would crash with a kernel out of memory warning which would basically render the site inoperable. The guys at Rimu actually tried to help me make it all work, but they basically recommended upgrading the virtual server, as Apache is pretty much a memory hog. Thankfully Rimu allows you […]

New Links Page

 Journal

I did a bit of work to my links page tonight. I wrote a piece of code so that now the people I follow on Twitter show up as well. It’s sort of a neat mashup, and I’m hoping to do a bit more with Twitter soon.

Entry #2: WordCamp San Francisco

 Journal

San Francisco is without a doubt one of my favourite cities in the world. It’s situated right on the Pacific Ocean, nestled snugly between Marin Country and Oakland. While Napa Valley is usually extremely hot, San Francisco boasts a fairly moderate climate, with sunshine occurring on most days of the year. In August, there’s going to be a WordCamp session down in San Francisco. Given that I’m a huge WordPress advocate, and that I love the Bay Area, I registered today and made the quick, impromptu decision to attend. Flights out of Vancouver are around $400, but are only around $250 return out of Seattle. So I think I’ll try and grab a late night flight on Friday and spend the weekend down in San Francisco. Lloyd Budd is also heading down, so undoubtedly I’ll run into him during the event. Of course, Matt Mullenweg will be there too, and […]

WordPress Without Borders, Round Two

 Journal

Thanks to everyone who left some feedback the other day about the new translation plugin. I’ve had some really great comments about it, and even the odd person that’s really anxious to test it out. I’m hoping to put a version up online tonight for people to download and try for themselves. For those people who didn’t catch it, what I did was write a WordPress plugin that takes advantage of the Google AJAX language API to dynamically translate the content of my blog into whatever language you as a reader ask for (by adjusting your browser settings). This works in both directions: blog entries will be converted into other languages, and comments left in other languages will be converted as well. So basically, as a reader of this blog you can read it in whatever language you want, and comment in whatever language you want. Check out the comments […]

Title Tags And WordPress

 Journal

I’ve spent a great deal of time in the last few months trying to understand how search engines work, and how sites get indexed. In my last article, I recommending that the XML Sitemap generator for WordPress should be installed on sites to help with search engine crawling. On this site, Google has gone from around 400 indexed articles (about 20%) up to around 1600 articles (about 80%) for my website — a substantial increase, entirely due to the sitemap. I want to write briefly about WordPress title tags in the context of search engine optimization. Most default WordPress blogs are configured to output the blog name first, followed by the article title (for example, reading an entry called “Things to do in Vancouver” on the blog MyBlog would have a title that looked like “MyBlog – Things To Do In Vancouver.” There are several problems with that approach. First, […]

WordPress 2.5 Beta

 Journal

Today I took the plunge and quickly upgraded my WordPress installation from 2.3.3 to the Beta for 2.5. In terms of look and feel on the front-end, I doubt you’ll notice any major changes (especially on sites where you don’t have to login). However, they’ve completely overhauled the administration section in the back to make things a little easier to find. I’m not going to really review it, because in all fairness it’s not quite done yet. However, the back end does seem a bit slower, maybe due to the new additions. Also, I have been completely unable to add media using the new interface. It either locks up or finishes uploading but refuses to add the link to the post data. I imagine this is one of the things they are still working on fixing. WordPress 2.5 Dashboard I like the overall look and feel of the back-end compared […]