(Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes)

Here’s a little something which has been in my Drafts queue for almost 2 years. It hardly seems blog-worthy. Then again, I haven’t seen anyone else publish screenshots or discussion on either server status or throttling.

Bluehost server status

Did you know you can check your server status at Bluehost? Here’s what that looks like:

Note the date. Heh.

Bluehost CPU throttling

Are you a good neighbor on your shared hosting account?

Bluehost knows. Here’s why.

I met some Bluehost engineers at WordCamp SF 2011. Cool folks. Mostly Perl hackers, which is appropriate for a Linux-based service. Bluehost also sponsors Linux kernel development, and has contributed code to the time sharing capabilities for Linux. This allows Bluehost to enforce a “good neighbor” policy on all of their shared hosts. If your account reaches a certain level of activity, you will be throttled down.

This is a good thing.

For one, if you have so much traffic that shared hosting is always throttling down, you should be on a different hosting plan. For another, if you have very little traffic and you’re being throttled, you should probably inspect your installation. Something isn’t right, and you should probably fix it.

Here’s what throttling looks like:

You can find the link to the throttling charts in your Bluehost cPanel interface.

Any questions?

Post from: Website In A Weekend

How to Check Bluehost Server Status and CPU Throttling

(Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes)

“Ask Anca” is a website advice column written by Anca Mosoiu. Anca owns Tech Liminal, a co-working space and technology hotspot.

With a WordPress site, there are several things that constitute maintenance.  Here is how I break it down:

1. Change text or graphics on pages. This is done through the WordPress interface, usually by our clients.
2. Add new pages or blog posts. Clients can do this on a WordPress site.
3. Change the navigation menus (add new links, remove old links). Clients can do this on a WordPress site.
4. Create particularly complex pages. This includes things with tables or graphics that have to line up just so.  If the client knows HTML, they are fine on their own, but we do help our clients with those types of issues.
5. Change the template for the site. Add a new column, change the colors, fonts, etc.  This is something that we would do for our clients.
6. Add something to an existing column on the site (e.g. subscription forms for email newsletters). This is something that we do for clients. We can also show them how to work with widgets and they can do it themselves.
7. Keep the WordPress software up to date. This is something a client could do through the administrative interface. We could do it for them or we could recommend a web hosting provider that does it.  I would probably recommend the latter option, as dealing with software upgrades isn’t always the most fun thing to do.  Ninety-nine percent of the time the upgrade goes well – but the one time it blows up- it’s worth having support.

Here are three example sites:

Heyday Books   We set up the site for them. They add their own books, authors and events, which appear in the proper place on the site.  Occasionally, they want to change how the site looks (e.g. moving a column from the left to the right, or changing how the search results are displayed).  We do this programming for them as needed.

Friends of Oakland Parks and Recreation   We set up this site for them in WordPress. We loaded the content and now they pretty much keep it up to date on their own.  Occasionally they call us to add a PayPal button to their donation page.  As you can see, this is not a “blog” site – it’s more of an informational site.

Get Cooking Simply   These food bloggers come to Tech Liminal for help with a few technical issues and occasional help with laying out the format of their recipes, but for the most part they create their own content and manage the site on their own.  Once in a while I help with updating the WordPress software since their website host is occasionally finicky.

Post from: Website In A Weekend

Ask Anca: How much site maintenance do your clients do on their own?

(Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes)

I’ve just come across a great little tool to help you build a robots.txt file for your website:

Robots.txt Generator

What is a robots.txt file? It’s basically a little text file you upload to your server which tells search engines which pages or directories of your site you want them to spider (or not spider). In other words, it tells search engines which pages to look at (please) and which pages to please ignore and not list in the Search Engine Results Pages.

This can be more important than one might think. You have files in your server that are not real webpages and you don’t want to distract search engines by allowing them to inspect and crawl over these boring unimportant (for SEO) files. Examples of this are image files in your “images” folder, or WordPress plugins and themes, etc.

You might also have a file which you don’t want indexed for other reasons. Such as the download page for ab E-Book you are selling. You would want people to only find that page after they have paid. If it shows up in the SERPs, they can just find it by accident and get it for free (gasp)!

So here is the little tool you can use. If you have more questions – well, Google it. But also leave me a comment so I can add some more information later when I have some more time!

Anna Williams is a blogger, webmaster, photographer, and poet. She has lived and traveled in four continents, and currently lives in a forest, in the Pacific Northwest. Visit her personal blog, view photos, or read poetry. Anna offers website development and related services.

Post from: Website In A Weekend

Fast and Easy Robots.txt File Generator

(Reading time: 7 – 11 minutes)

Broken links frustrate readers and make Google think you are a bad blogger. You will want to eliminate broken links from your blog, and keep them at bay.

Broken links come in two cases:

1. There’s a bad link on your side, perhaps there is a typo or misspelling in your href attribute for your link.
2. The web page has moved or disappeared on the target site.

Both cases apply to internal links to your blog posts and pages, and external or outbound links targeting web pages elswhere.

For Case 1, you may need to do a little sleuthing.

Sometimes the problem is obvious, sometimes it’s subtle. The first place to start is to copy the URL directly from the href attribute into your web browser and see what happens.

For example, I just fixed a URL that looked like this: http:http://somedomain.com/. Probably my fault, a cut and paste error.

For Case 2, links expire for any number of reasons.

On WordPress.com or Blogger blogs, the owner may delete the entire site. The blog or website owner may let the domain name expire, sometimes by accident, whence the registrar or a new owner parks the domain.

Usually there is little you can do except notify the site owner (if you can find him or her) and remove the link from your blog post.

However, if the link really is useful, you may be able to find the same web page at a different URL. Perhaps the site owner moved it for some reason, or a redirect was deleted. Google is your friend here.

Find and fix broken links

There’s a lot of ways to find broken links. You can examine all the pages on your blog, and click through on the links. But that’s so last millennium, and as Johnson Yip notes,

Clicking every link in your blog can be very time consuming for finding broken links.

Boring.

Instead, here’s three ways to automate that task:

1. Use a web service such as the Link Checker – The W3C Markup Validation Service.

   Using any W3 tool is a smart idea, at least on an occasional basis. The W3 doesn’t have any commercial interest, and provides a neutral, third party analysis of your site. You may find that the W3 tools catch problems and issues other tools miss.

2. Use Google Webmaster tools to investigate site crawl errors.

   I recommend checking your site with Webmaster tools no matter what, because you see what Google sees. No guesswork.

3. For WordPress users, install the Broken Link Checker plugin.

I really like using the Broken Link Checker plugin for WordPress, and it’s my first defense against broken links.

Let’s take a closer look at this highly useful plugin.

Broken Link Checker features

First, here’s a list of important features:

• Detects links that don’t work, including 404 Not Found, 410 Gone, 403 Forbidden, Connection Failed, 500 Internal Server Error, Timeout, and Server Not Found (DNS issue).
• Detects missing images.
• Periodically checks links in posts, pages, comments and the blogroll. Checking comments is especially important, and you will see after a few months that many of your commenter’s web sites will vanish! Unlink them.

  Trackbacks are also included in comment link checking.

• New and modified entries are checked ASAP.
• Notifies you on the Dashboard if any problems are found.
• Lets you edit all instances of a specific link at once.
• Gives you a list of all links ever posted on your site, with the ability to search and filter it.
• Lets you apply custom CSS styles to broken and removed links.
• Highly configurable.
• Bug reporting and feature request forum! Forums are a lot of work; take this as a commitment from the plugin author.

Benefit: Broken Link Checker will save you a massive amount of time eliminating broken links.

Website In A Weekend has 5353 links (October 3, 2010).

Imagine checking all of those links by hand, or by submitting your blog pagewise to link checking services. Or even if you paid for a full-scale analysis for your blog, you would still have to dig into the posts and pages containing broken links one at a time.

Instead, the plugin saves you time by collecting every link which needs fixing into a simple, intuitive web interface.

Note: when you first install Broken Link Checker, it won’t have any results to report. The plugin needs to run for a while on your blog to collect data over time. If you prefer to keep the number of your plugins to an absolute minimum, install Broken Link Checker, let it run for a couple of weeks, then clean up the mess. If you like keeping your plugin count low, uninstall it after you clean up, then reinstall when you need it again.

Depending on your publishing schedule, repeat this link cleanup monthly to quarterly, you should be in good shape.

Case study: Gordie Rogers

Long time readers (bofem) will recognize – and welcome back – Gordie Rogers. Gordie used to publish a lifestyle design website and blog, but wasn’t able to make the numbers work at the time. So he took a bit of break, and now he’s back with Personal Development X.

Gordie has loads of comments here on Website In A Weekend, all pointing to the old lifestyle design articles, and all currently broken.

Let’s give Gordie a hand. We’ll fix the broken links on Website In A Weekend, and get Gordie a few dozen (dofollow) backlinks for his new website. Here’s how we’ll do it:

1. First, we’ll replace the lifestyle design URL in all of his comments.
2. Then we’ll unlink, for now, all the CommentLuv links returning HTTP 404 errors.

This can be done fast, takes maybe 10 minutes. Here’s a 3 minute screencast to show you exactly how it works:

Brief excursion: canonical plugins

WordPress is sufficiently mature and has a sufficiently large user base (8% of the whole web), that it makes sense to maintain a “best of breed” list of plugins worth following in detail. Such plugins are characterized by:

1. Usefulness.
2. Good designed.
3. Maturity.

Broken Link Checker meets these criteria, so it’s on the Official Website In A Weekend list. Expect more on this topic of canonical plugins, and how such a list fits into a “micro-niche” strategy for developing authority.

While I’m at it, here’s a few words from Janis Elsts, the plugin author.

µ-interview with Janis Elsts

WIAW: What was your main motivation for developing BLC? Frustration? The challenge of coding? Something else?

JE: I must admit I don’t really remember what the initial motivation was. I guess it was one of those lucky ideas, stumbling upon an unfulfilled need.

WIAW: How long have you been working on BLC?

JE: The first version of the plugin was released on 5th August, 2007. So, just over three years now.

WIAW: Offerring a Pro version indicates you are committed to BLC as a long(er) term project. Are you comfortable mentioning one or two features users might expect in the future?

JE: A few things that I would like to add, eventually :
* Link suggestions, i.e. automatically finding alternatives for broken links.
* Support for internationalized domain names.
* Bulk URL editing.

As you probably know, there is a dedicated forum where users can suggest new features and provide feedback:
Broken Link Checker forum.

Most likely, any new features (once implemented) will only be available to users who’ve purchased the Pro version.

Speaking of the Pro version…

Help keep Broken Link Checker up-to-date

Broken Link Checker also has a Pro version for the very reasonable price of $4.99 US (October 3, 2010).

The Pro version of Broken Link Checker is available from WP Plugins. It’s advertised through the plugin with a screen options tab (as of October 3, 2010).

By the way, I prefer to promote professional and paid versions of blogging tools, including plugins, and here’s why: it means the author of the plugin is taking his work seriously enough to realize his effort should be compensated. That reassures me that the time I take learning such tools won’t be wasted. Because it’s just horrible to sink hours, days, weeks or more of you life into a technology that dies. Paying a few bucks to help keep worthy technology alive and growing just makes sense.

Anyway, there you are, a great plugin and a few other ways to check broken links. Here’s a few questions for you:

Are you regularly checking for broken links?

If so, how?

If not why not?

Off to the comments!

Post from: Website In A Weekend

Broken Link Checker plugin for WordPress (review)

(Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes)

People paying close attention (bofem) to the runaway locomotive occasionally referred to as “Website In A Weekend” may have noticed an odd looking website this morning. In fact, Website In A Weekend looked suspiciously like a completely unstyled Thesis theme installation.

Which it was.

Because this morning’s hour (and most of yesterday’s) was devoted to upgrading from version 1.7 to version 1.8.

Upgrading isn’t a terribly difficult. There are four main tasks:

1. Upgrading the custom.css.
2. Upgrading the custom_functions.php.
3. Copying any current custom images.
4. Ensuring the style settings are updated.

Thesis upgrading “gotchas”

We need to discuss the “gotchas” first.

The main annoyance is that Thesis doesn’t like to have more than one of itself in your themes/ directory, and you cannot run two different versions of Thesis side-by-side. If you attempt to run a previous version with a later version in the themes/ folder, you will get the Big Green Button forcing you to upgrade. You will not be able to work with any of the options in the older version. I won’t give my technical opinion of this, suffice it to say that’s saying quite enough.

(Thesis makes it hard on itself by storing all it’s options in the options table using Thesis global keys. I would store options keyed to version number. It’s not that hard and would eliminate the need for the Big Green Button.)

The second annoyance is that version 1.8 will not import options from version 1.7. This is a second problem for being able to run two Thesis versions side-by-side.

The benefit of running two versions side-by-side is that when you upgrade from the previous to the present, it’s seamless. No one will see the change.

But, these are relatively minor matters. If you upgrade the way Thesis expects, it takes about 10 minutes, with a very brief excursion into the unstyled theme mentioned above.

Upgrading the custom folder

custom.css and custom_functions.php reside in the thesis_18/custom/ folder (don’t forget to rename custom-sample/ to custom/).

You want to save both custom.css and custom_functions.php locally, preferably somewhere backed up as well. I have an entire tool chain built for handling these maintenance chores

Copy the images down as well.

You could, in fact, just copy the whole custom folder, which will also overwrite the layout.css file. I prefer not to do that, and just copy only the files strictly necessary for the upgrade.

Install Thesis 1.8

Once you have your custom files downloaded and backed up, install version 1.8, and activate it.

Now upload your custom files and images.

If all goes well, and it should, everything should Just Work.

Once you’re satisfied that version 1.8 is working correctly, go ahead and delete version 1.7. You have everything necessary backed up, right? It shouldn’t be problem, and may well prevent future problems.

Post from: Website In A Weekend

Thesis Theme Upgrade to Version 1.8 Smooth as Silk

(Reading time: 6 – 10 minutes)

Blogging seemed easy... so tempting...

It seemed so easy: you can set up WordPress in 5 minutes or less! And buying a domain name is just a click of the mouse. But…

These supposedly harmless, innocuous little blogs have become stale, stinking up your hosting account. You risk confusing your readers… and the distraction costs you time better spent on your main blog.

I can relate. I’ve always been a sucker for the dangerous ladies of Distraction and Confusion.

Never fear:

We’re going to help you dismantle those broken down, half witted, half baked, seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-the-time blogs – and roll all that hard work into something you can use, right now, without losing any of your (likely very small) traffic to those practically moribund blogs.

Here’s my story:

1. Problem:I’ve got more blogs right now than I can handle.
2. Solution: Condense into two blogs: one focused on WordPress (Website In A Weekend), the other on everything else (There Is No Box).

I have around 400,000 words published on these two blogs, and likely another 100,000 words published on all the rest combined. No need to throw those words away. That would be wasteful. So, “decommission” some blogs.

Why decommission a blog?

At some point, you decide you no longer wish to continue working on a particular blog. Perhaps you have lost your passion and no longer have inspiration to continue writing. Perhaps the maintenance load is too high; decommissioning reduces your maintenance load:

• No need to update WP versions or plugins.
• No need to maintain backups, which costs server space somewhere.

Maybe you have two niches that are growing more together than apart, with one growing much faster than the other. Decommissioning allows you to continue posting material on an irregular basis to get it indexed in search engines. New material relevant to the decommissioned site could come in as pages and subpages, instead of as posts.

In short, you went to the trouble to write in the first place, give it a fresh start in a new home.

Decommissioning basic concepts

The most effective – and easiest – technique for decommissioning is to simply blow the site away. Delete it! No fuss, no muss, you just lightened your load.

Given you want to keep your work (and you should), here’s a few considerations:

• Biggest question: Save SERPs, or don’t care about SERPs?

  If don’t care about preserving past search results from the blog to be decommissioned, it’s easy, just copy and redirect domain.

  If you do want to preserve search results, it’s harder. You may have to bring posts over one at a time, adding redirects at the server level. One way to handle broken, changed permalinks is classify a group that moves the same way, and move them all at once. Another way is to move posts one at a time, let Google work it out on the search index side, with a customized 404 page handling requests coming through for old link. Handling redirects is an art form, worthy of it’s own discussion in a future article.

  You can split the difference: Redirect everything on the decommissioned blogs to point to a post or page on new blog.

• Explain what’s going on to existing readers. Add a “top-level” post to suck up server redirections from the domain where the blog is being decommissioned.
• Create a category for the posts on from the decommissioned blog. This category may be a child of an existing category on your blog, or may be a top level category for itself, with subcategories corresponding to the decommissioned blogs categories.
• Decide how to date incoming material. You may want to preserve original publication dates, or you may want to schedule new material into the future.
• Watch your server level 404 logs, not just your WordPress blog 404 (e.g., as handled by Redirection plugin).

Blowing away “Reason Why Advertising”

ReasonWhyAdvertising.info was built for a couple of different reasons. I found a PDF file of the original book, and I wanted to see what kind of “Speed of Implementation” it would take to get a blog up and running with the entire PDF file posted (3 hours total). I was curious how to post very long content, whether as posts or pages. And I wanted to grab some traffic for that domain name.

In any case, my current policy of posting very long articles as separate posts and pages is a result of not spending much time thinking about the problem. I don’t have time to care about traffic to the domain; Website In A Weekend keeps me plenty busy!

1. Create a Reason Why Advertising introduction page explaining what’s going on.
2. Copy all the posts from Reason Why Advertising into subpages of the introduction page on Website In A Weekend, then link all the subpages from the introduction page for a table of contents.
3. Write a Reason Why Advertising blog post that points to the parent page.

4. Redirect the top level domain reasonwhyadvertising.info to the Reason Why Advertising introduction page. Feel free to be clever to use the appropriate regular expressions to capture search results for all the pages you’re deleting. If you used an “addon” domain on a shared hosting account at Bluehost (or similar), you will something similar to the following in your .htaccess file:

   RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^reasonwhyadvertising.info$ [OR]
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.reasonwhyadvertising.info$
   RewriteRule ^/?$ "http\:\/\/website\-in\-a\-weekend\.net\/reason\-advertising\/" [R=301,L]

5. Get one last, valid backup from the reasonwhyadvertising.info blog, including images, etc.
6. Get a fresh, valid backup from Website In A Weekend with all the new Reason Why pages backed up.
7. Delete the database. Check the wp_config.php very carefully. This step is irrevocable!
8. Delete all the files and subdirectories from the blog directory except the .htaccess file. All files related to the reasonwhyadvertising.info are now removed from the hosting account.

This is about an hour’s work, outside of looking up (and testing) the regular expression necessary for redirecting the traffic.

Decommissioning may take longer than starting up

Unless you care nothing at all about your search results, decommissioning a blog may take several days or more. Or rather, it may need to be spread out over many days, and not all those days may be consecutive.

This is especially important if you plan to roll blog posts into your publishing stream at a later date. Then you may have to revisit redirection links as material from the old blog is republished on the new blog.

If you are bringing all the published material over and preserving the original date of publication, it’s much easier.

Recommission blogs when traffic and content permit

Once a commercially viable amount of content is posted, the blog can be “recommissioned.” The recommissioning process is essentially the same as splitting your blog, reverse: 1. Set up your new blog on the domain, 2. copy over the content, and 3. set the redirects appropriately. Watch for an article on recommissioning in the future.

An hour of free consulting to the first person who correctly identifies which series of posts Website In A Weekend is going to split off to form a new blog on a dedicated domain. An extra hour for guessing the domain. Offer expires 1 month after publication date.

Post from: Website In A Weekend

How to Quickly Decommission a WordPress Blog – Without Losing (too much) Search Ranking

(Reading time: 6 – 10 minutes)

One of the things I really love about Website In A Weekend is that I have the coolest, most diverse audience in Blogistan. (prove that I don’t! :) A while back, David Hutchison stopped by with some words of wisdom on hosting. As usual, I instantly roped him in to a guest post. I don’t know David personally, but from email and reading through his hockey goaltending niche blog, I’m impressed: Hockey, rowing coach, physics and computer science teacher. With this article, David is coming to us from inGoal Magazine, his website specializing in hockey goaltending.

Hostest With the Mostest – Being a good neighbor on shared hosting

-by David Hutchison

David kindly invited me to submit a guest article, related to my recent comment on finding a web host. I’ve been enjoying Website in a Weekend and it was my pleasure to submit this. I’m certainly no expert but I hope that my experience is either helpful to you, or the beginning of a conversation on this site that will help others.

I have had an interesting adventure with web hosting as I have grown my site, inGoal Magazine, into a site for hockey goaltenders that receives a reasonable amount of traffic. I began the project, and it remains today, as a hobby. There are several reasons for this that would make an interesting article as well, but that’s for another day. Wanting to incur a minimum in expenses I went with a shared hosting plan, as I suspect most readers will be using. For less than 10 bucks a month you can get a reasonable plan just about anywhere. With shared hosting you are given space on a managed server, along with many others –how many I’m sure depends on your host but I used myIPneighbors.com and found that I am on the same server with 778 others.

It is possible for your site to crash through no fault of your own. One bad neighbor can bring everyone else down. It happened a few times to me – but one day, without realizing it, I was the bad neighbor.

How to be a good neighbour – and maximize your site’s potential on a budget

Eventually, if you aren’t careful, you’ll “outgrow” your shared hosting plan. That’s the message I got from my host one day when our site’s traffic went over 5000 page views and our server crashed. Finally we were getting some decent traffic and we were out of commission. And a quick look around told me that whatever the next step of hosting would be for us, it was going to get expensive. We’re a non-commercial (read: no revenue) site and that just wasn’t an option.

Our host was kind enough to take some time to explain it all to me. We were serving up far too much data – consuming more than our fair share of bandwidth. I was on a hosting plan that had (in theory) unlimited bandwidth. They were willing to fulfill that commitment, but did it only after throttling things so the bandwidth I got was going to come out very slowly. Page load times went through the roof.

The problem was simple.

inGoal Magazine is photo-intensive

People come to see, amongst other things, the latest photos of goalie masks, and professional shots of goalies in action. Back then I was taking the easy route, the route that seemed to provide the most benefit for our readers. I would upload big images, downsize them for posts and use a lightbox plugin so when readers clicked on the shots a much bigger image popped up on the screen.

What does this all mean in reality? One 1024 px wide image at 72 dpi comes in around 250 kb in size. Today I have 31 images in various posts on our homepage. Do a little math and that could be over 7 Mb in photos being served up for a singe pageview! A 5000 page view day would be 35Gb of data.

Clearly I was not being a good neighbour on my site.

So – what is the solution? Today at GoDaddy I would need a $180 per month dedicated server to handle the kind of data I was kicking out. There is no guarantee that it could handle it either – one server can only handle so many simultaneous requests. Cloud hosting sounds like the solution to simultaneous requests, but again it’s not cheap.

There are lots of options to deal with the problem: downsize your images, display fewer on the home page and so on. For us though, it wasn’t the complete answer. I have moved to a maximum of 650px wide, for example, but our readers come for photos and we aren’t willing to compromise a great deal. This situation immediately explained to me why people host images and other media off their site.

My affordable hosting solution

Because we are dealing with photographs – you can’t do this with any other graphics – I host most of my new images on Flickr. For about $25 a year I have a pro account and can host essentially an unlimited number of images. The photographers who contribute to our site do the same. I’m sure places like Photobucket, and Picasa give you similar options, but I haven’t explored them.

This is not for everyone for sure. You can’t upload images that aren’t yours to use (not that you should do this anyway), and you have to link back to the Flickr photo page from the images you insert on your blog. No more fancy lightbox, a curious click on your image needs to head to Flickr. But I’m wiling to do that because I can’t afford the alternative.

The professional solution without these restrictions of course is to go with something like Amazon’s S3 service. As I read it, with Amazon you’re looking at some $0.15 per Gb which for me would be over $200 per month. That was at 5000 page views. My biggest day came recently during the Olympics at 33,000 views.

Thanks to my move to Flickr, a single pageview now requires my host to serve up less than 200Kb. If we assume that trouble came when my server had to deal with about 30 GB of bandwidth then I should be good now up to about 175,000 page views per day. I think it’s safe to say that isn’t about to happen. Problogger serves 30-50 thousand in a day.

Multiple Load Balanced Servers on a Budget

As I noted before, a single dedicated server might not serve my needs. Even if it could handle the data I serve, I have a feeling that at some point it would not handle enough simultaneous requests (one pageview requires many requests). Obviously it’s a different scale, but that’s one reason Google has farms of servers.

Whether it’s the deluxe Amazon solution or my budget conscious Flickr solution though I know that the company serving the bulk of my content is doing it from a large farm of top of the line servers. Even if I went with a new hosting plan and my own dedicated server, I couldn’t do that.

This is just one situation and I expect readers could offer all kinds of suggestions for me and for others in similar situations. I would welcome your comments.

David Hutchison is the editor of inGoal Magazine. Together with a team of writers and photographers who share his commitment and passion for goaltending he is building a leading site for the most important players on any ice hockey team. And he does it at night after the kids go to bed.

Post from: Website In A Weekend

Hostest With the Mostest – Being a good neighbor on shared hosting

(Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes)

There are some arguments in life that can never be won. Mets or Yankees? Tutti frutti or rum n raisin? Whiskey or beer? Dave Thackeray takes on a blogger’s dilemma…

WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache?

-by Dave Thackeray

Feverish was my anticipation of installing Total Cache after the Super Cache had been ploughing a furrow for my diseased database to trail along… while the tinkle and clatter of my 50+ plugins sounded from the rear.

I’ll be the first, and the last, to admit I’ve never really hung around the coding corner long enough to fathom the intricacies of cache. My closest encounter until recently came when King Podcaster Laporte spoke excitedly of Cachefly.com. Excitedly, as the ker-ching of sponsorship cash in the kitty resonated around Cottage Leoville.

In my Website 101 class, I discerned – slightly, barely – that cache is when the interwebs kidnaps pages and files on your behalf so you don’t have to go loading them all over again. Albeit a fortuitous, no-Amnesty-International-required, no kitties harmed abduction.

Since I’ve been dishing out scraps of creativity on the blog side of the tracks, I’ve become more interested in the benefits of Mighty Cache. To many, “cache” really IS cash: if you’ve got an eCommerce site, feeding content through the pipes quicker than your competitor means extra meat on the table.

So I come to my experimentation. Exhibit 1, WP Super Cache, is everything you need as a green blogger. Your demands on JavaScript are light; plugins number no more than 10; and it simply works, out of the box (a bit like Atahualpa, if you’ll recall my virgin attendance in pixellated form chez my binary guru, Dave ‘Website in a Weekend’ Doolin).

Inevitably, you crave more.

You want a fancy carousel to display your content; your navigation area needs to shore up the link salvation provided by John Godley’s godly Redirection plugin. And you won’t sleep at night unless you can serve a tasty smorgasbord of images with every full-fat post.

That’s when you need to call in the cache ninjas; deft, flight of foot and utterly ingenious, these warriors of winning websites are manifested in everything epitomised by W3 Total Cache.

A while back, ever-so-frustrated by WP Super Cache’s lack of Adonis-like speed prowess, I decided to look into the wonders of Minify, an effort by Google to provide alchemic compression of CSS and JS. We all love and live by the law of CSS and JS these days, like it or not. Unless you put your rubies on rails, or handy python.

It didn’t work much, but then, it certainly didn’t promise to cure stupidity, so it’s a love-all compromise.

W3 Total Cache comes with Minify built in. This time it works, probably because the guys who built the WordPress plug-in knew what to use it for, and how to caress the Google baby’s shiny buttons.

To say it flies in style would be like comparing a Cessna to a Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

Upload W3, activate it, head straight for the Minify Settings option and drop all your CSS and JS files (other than any dynamically-generated ones and conditional CSS for incontinent IE browsers) in the appropriate fields at the bottom. The mighty Yoast (of yoast.com) recommends embedding the JS scripts in the footer, as per the option on this page. So just do it: never disagree with ANYONE whose forehead equates in size to a football field.

You’d see huge speed gains straight away.

But I don’t stop there.

Not for you, not when we’re this close (and I imagine right now you’re wondering how you could clone me or add my double helix to that of your progeny).

There’s another beautiful page in the W3 Total Cache options that talks about “Content Distribution Networks” (CDN). Here’s my interpretation of CDN: to save undue load on your server, you hire a CDN spot on the web to host all your burdensome files and scripts. Then every time they’re called, the load is shared between your server and the CDN hangout. Everything pops up on your visitor’s screen in double quick time.

Well CDN sounds like a big deal to me. But there’s a place on the web where, as of today, you could snap up exactly what you need for $10 A YEAR! The holy grail is Max CDN. They’ll give you 1TB of bandwidth for that. Now I don’t know whether you serve up high definition hot and juicy mammas from Mexico, but if not, that’ll do you until the Second Coming.

For a full rundown on how to CDN your WordPress in conjunction with W3 Total Cache, check out a quick and dirty tutorial courtesy of the Racker Hacker dude.

I truly believe off the back of W3 Total Cache I managed to save a project that had taken me months of hard labour to get off the ground. It launches next week, and I get paid. [And we want a link to it when it's live - Dave]

Dave Thackeray Want to be a radio star? Guest on Dave Thackeray's InspiRadio, a unique business-focused online radio network. Listen live or check out the InspiRadio website for more information.

Post from: Website In A Weekend

Super or Total? Money Talks But Cache Rules

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Thesis Theme version 1.7 is out. This is probably good news in the long term, in the short term, just adds to my already overfull plate. I’m hungry, but not that hungry!

If you’re trying to upgrade Thesis Theme and you get this annoying big, fat green button like this:

I can definitely help you out!

It took me a fair bit of poking around in the Thesis forums to figure it out, but this is how I did it, using material from the forum and the Thesis Database Page:

1. You need to delete the options database items using the code as shown in the linked page, reproduced here (because it’s confusing there):

   delete_option('thesis_design_options');
   delete_option('thesis_options');

2. Press the big, fat, green “Upgrade Thesis” button. This will do whatever it does, and return you to the Site Options page.
3. Remove the delete_option code you just added in Step 1.
4. You may have to repeat this step, press the “Upgrade Thesis” button again.

That’s all it took for me… running on my localhost installation. I’m about to start the upgrade here on Website In A Weekend.

Let me know if you have had to solve this problem as well, or how these directions worked for you.

Post from: Website In A Weekend

Thesis Theme 1.7 Big, Fat, Green “Upgrade Thesis” Button

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Announcing the first Website In A Weekend Wednesday Workshop!

This coming Wednesday, February 23, 2010, we’ll spend a couple of hours speeding up our WordPress installation, focusing on how plugins are slowing down our loading speed.

WordPress – the need for speed

If you operate a self-hosted WordPress blog, you need to understand the following:

• How to measure the effect of a plugin on loading speed.
• How to ensure Javascript is being optimally served.
• How to ensure CSS is being optimally served.

Google announced late 2009 that search rankings would be affected by web page loading speed, starting some time in 2010. Google usually anounces launches ex post facto, so they’ve probably already started.

And besides, how long do you want your readers to wait for your pages to load? Trust me: not long… you want your pages to load very, very quickly.

WordPress Wednesday Workshops

Once or twice a month on a Wednesday, I’ll be available – for free – on Skype for collaborative learning sessions. These sessions will cover a wide range of topics, at levels from beginner to advanced. These sessions will be at least 1 hour long. If we really get on a roll, could go possibly 2-3 hours.

The first Wednesday Workshop will be Wednesday February 24, 2010, starting at 2 pm Pacific Time. Email me or leave a comment, I will send you my private Skype account username.

We’ll be spending an hour or two digging into really tedious and boring aspects of web application delivery. I’ll recap for everyone who participates, but I won’t post what we learn publicly.

During the workshop, I’ll be taking notes for a dedicated web page on WordPress Plugin Speed. I’ll provide access to this page for all workshop participants.

Note:

• I won’t be publishing this material in toto. If you choose to participate, you will be learning techniques that will give your blog a competitive advantage.
• Newsletter subscribers, you’re in with the usual password.

You want in? Email me, or leave a comment below, I’ll send you the details.

Post from: Website In A Weekend

Wednesday Workshop – Speed Session I: WordPress Plugins