OMNINOGGIN

In this post I will discuss some of the web design mistakes that I have done on this blog, and what I did to fix them.

A few months ago, I was fortunate enough to get free advice from a friend of mine, Emily Luong, who happens to be a professional graphics designer.  Aside from being a graphics design geek, she’s put in good work on nice sites like Edelbio Skin Care Blog so I do not take her advice lightly.  I asked her to review my blog and what do you know?  It needs improving!

Read on…

Weekend Links for the week ending on 07-11-08

• WordPress Template Tags Reference Guide: This is the best consolidated WordPress functions reference guide I’ve ever seen. Not only does it have a slick interface, the page shows available functions, its parameters descriptions, and example usage. This is a golden bookmark for anybody who works on WordPress, WordPress Themes, or WordPress plugins.
• How to Stop Being Invisible: Writing is a difficult task for most, but getting readers for your articles is even more difficult. This post gives insight on why readers read blogs and gives advice on how to make your content more noticeable.
• 7 Ways To Stay Informed And Up-To-Date Online: Do you ever run out of things to talk about on your blog? I’ve found that I get a lot of blogging inspirations from staying informed. These are a list of tools that you can use to help you stay informed of the latest happenings in your niche.
• PHP Speedy Turns WordPress Into Speed Demon: Looking for another way to uberize (read as optimize) your WordPress blog? This post talks about the benefits of PHP Speedy and also links you to other how-to-optimize-WordPress posts.

Read on…

This tutorial will augment the technique of automatically enabling WP-Cache during heavy load with the ability to switch to a low-bandwidth WordPress theme at the same time.

Few reasons to do this

1. WP-Cache messes with your site statistics, so you do not want to leave it on when your site is not being hammered.
2. You don’t want to use a bandwidth efficient theme all the time because it’s not pretty-lookin’.
3. During traffic storms (e.g. Digg Effect), every 1/100 second optimization tweak counts.
4. If you host your site on a shared host, you will most likely have a bandwidth quota. Switching to a leaner theme conserves your bandwidth (duh!)
5. If you host your site on a home connection, your upload is not up to par with most hosting services, so you need to use that small pipe efficiently.
6. Each “IMG” tag, even if it’s a 1×1 pixel gif, requires an HTTP request to your web server. If you have 10 images on your page, and 10 users are loading your page, that’s 100 simultaneous calls to your server already. Leaner themes usually means less/no images, giving Apache some break.
7. If you’re server is non-uber, you don’t deserve to administer it.
Read on…

I am a semi-fan of WP-Cache. On the good side, it reduces strain on apache by staticising WordPress pages. On the bad side, it messes with my site statistics and makes development hard (I always forget that the page I’m working on is being cached). I like my statistics, but what if I suddenly get a traffic storm? If my site gets dugg, there is no time to worry about statistics. I would need all the help I can get to serve pages efficiently. This is why WP-Cache should be off by default and automatically turned on during traffic storms. Read on…