As part of my site redesign I wanted to be able to list the latest articles for a specific category. Since I finished my category moves quicker than expected it was time to get on this task. Read the rest »
WordPress: Bulk Category Move
I needed to change the category for several hundred of my posts. Rather than use a plugin I found that the built-in admin tools in WordPress worked just fine. Read the rest »
Optimizing My Website – Low Hanging Fruit
In this article I look at the 4 main areas which I could easily optimize to improve my website performance. Image optimization, CSS optimization, Javascript optimization and plugin optimization where all used to improve the performance of my Wordpress site. Read the rest »
The OS Quest Trail Log #44: Long Overdue Edition
Egads! It’s been over 2 months since the last trail log. I also came across an old comment where I’d being doing the trail logs weekly. A week, two months, barely a difference. Unfortunately the real world has been intruding on the quest more than I’d like so while there have been a lot of changes (Windows 7, Snow Leopard, more…) I haven’t really had the chance to dig into the new features they offer. Website Changes The most recent change was to the design of this website. It was [...] Read the rest »
WordPress – The Windows of the Internet
It’s been widely reported that sites running the standalone version of WordPress are under “attack” and vulnerabilities are being exploited to insert malicious code into the site. I couldn’t help but notice similarities to Microsoft Windows. While WordPress may not have the same market share as Windows it does have greater mindshare than any other single publishing platform. (OK, I don’t have the stats to back that up so maybe I’m wrong.) There’s even a major hosting company that specifically promotes WordPress standalone hosting. So like Windows, which comes pre-installed [...] Read the rest »
WordPress 2.8.2
It figures, I just get everything up to WordPress 2.8.1 and the next day a new version gets released. WordPress 2.8.2 fixes a XSS security vulnerability. The good news is that it was quick easy to update my WordPress installations since they are all now maintained using svn. There were only 8 changed files which made the update quick. Certainly a lot easier than downloading, extracting and copying the entire installation. The following command upgraded WordPress when it was run from the WordPress installation directory: svn sw http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.8.2/ . Read the rest »
WordPress Updates & Converting to SVN
WordPress 2.8 came out awhile ago and there was immediate talk of WordPress 2.8.1 to fix some issues. So I was in no rush to do any update despite liking to stay up to date. WordPress 2.8.1 was released so I decided to bring all my sites up to WordPress 2.8.1 and to update the theme or convert to svn as appropriate. I had tested using svn to maintain WordPress awhile back but this site and a couple had yet to be converted. It was time to convert them now [...] Read the rest »
The OS Quest Trail Log #40: April 2009 Edition
Ok, it’s actually the first of May so the title is wrong, but this post is all about the last month. I had 14 posts this month. I have to go back to July 2008 to find a month with an equal number of posts and March 2008 to find a month with more posts. My April obsession was optimizing WordPress on Apache and that obsession didn’t take hold until the last half of the month. Things started off simply enough, I just wanted to see if there was a [...] Read the rest »
Caching WordPress Pages with mod_expires
The final step in my WordPress/Apache optimization was to look at mod_expires. The Apache mode_expires module is used to tell a browser how long it can cache the page. With expiration enabled a browser will refresh a page from it’s local cache rather than the server, at least until the page expires. On my site the pages a relatively static, they may change when a comment is added but that’s about it. The pictures and graphics will almost never change. So I’ll give regular pages a fairly short cache time [...] Read the rest »
Apache mod_deflate with WordPress
To continue along with my Apache experimentation I decided to enable Apache mod_deflate on my server. All I run is WordPress and I probably won’t gain much of an increase over enabling compression in WP Super Cache. But at least this way I won’t be limited to the plugin and WordPress. I’m running Apache 2 on Ubuntu 8.10 Server and the configuration was a breeze. Why use compression"? To save bandwidth for myself and visitors, and with less download time it means faster performance. The /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/deflate.conf file contains the line: [...] Read the rest »