real blogging tips

Every blogger that is serious and thinks about the end game needs a set of tools to succeed. The end game can be many different things for many different people, but for now lets not worry about what your goal is. Let’s get that blog up to par to help achieve your goals. This will mark an ongoing series of posts in the catagory of Blogging Tools. Keep your eyes out for these as they will all contain easy to use tools to improve your blog 100 fold.

The first little tool I will share with you is an excellent blog site load-time tester. This will give you an idea of what kind of overall shape your site is in. Generally a fast loading blog will be considered to be 5-7seconds. That is my opinion as I generally have a good assortment of plugins and javascripts to load. This being said if you load quicker than 5 seconds you probably have nothing to worry about in the load time department. My site is generally loading in 5-7 seconds depending on variables outside of my control.  But say a site like John Chow’s… loads generally around 15-20 seconds. This is something huge for a start up blogger to consider as most people will not wait 15-20 seconds on a new blog. Obviously JC is doing something right as he retains his traffic.

I want you to head over to >http://tools.pingdom.com and try this out. Let us know what your averaging after about three different tests. If I were you I would also sign up for the free 30 day uptime test for your blog as well. Hey if it is not up and your paying for it you ought to know about it!

If you have multiple javascripts loading or extremly large graphics I recommend you pick and choose these wisely. While I do run woopra AND google analytics this generally does not effect the load time. However untill I switched hosts my graphics were completely uncompressed. This made load times run up to 15 seconds from my now 5 or so on average. As you can see resaving them slightly compressed did not compromise the quality of the image and also helped make my load times much quicker.

Depending on the type of hosting you have I would highly recommend running supercache plugin. This is a wordpress plugin. This will cache your landing page’s php into one html file. How does that help you ask? Well it keeps your server from having to run the php scripts through the processor and instead loads a cached version of them from a html file. I have mine set to refresh every 10 minutes at the moment. Also comments, new posts or new dynamic content will cause the plugin to recache the page as people visit it to keep it live so to speak. Now a word of caution here as I had to change how OIO publisher presented all of my ad’s. They were a php script. This would keep any rotation from happening since it would be static except when new content or comments were posted or a new post. As you can see I do not have this problem. By using the AD Server offered within the OIO Publisher plugin you can post them just as you had before but isntead with javascript which is loaded via the html and is not litereally cached but loaded live every time by the html. Viola you have just help your site load tremendously quicker.

This is not so much for your benefit as a publisher but a gigantic plus for your new readers arriving via links, organic traffic who would otherwise not wait for the site to load as they are not invested at all and have no loyalty to you or your content. This is the first step in winning over your readers. While if you are that good you can overcome a slow site with a great design and award winning content, but why chance it when you can easily give your site that much needed tune up. I found this tool using google in an attempt to see a before and after between hosts. Lets just say I am very happy I was NOT paying for my last hosting and that my new hosting which is provided by HostGator is top notch. If you are having issues with your host as I was I highly recommend HostGator. Many of the people in my blogging circle use them and without complaint.

Just in case you are unsure how to “compress” your images here is a quick “How To”. First load your graphics program of choice. I believe some version of Microsoft Paint will even let you do this, but I can not recall at this point. Next Load the image in question. Usually you will get the most net gain from the largest area type images, for me this is my header and custom rss button. Once loaded click save as. You will want to save this image as a different name as to not save over your previous image just in case this one does not turn out as you had wished. If you are lucky enough to have photoshop you will get a preview option which will help judge where you want the quality vs compression. The different in my header size from no compression to 50% is roughly 100k. This means because of its new size loads much faster creating a much more seamless expereince for the reader. If you were to do this for all of your graphics then you can imagine how much you could shave off of your load times. That is if they are high. If they are not then you really should not be bothered to much by this. Once you have resaved them upload and change code accordingly and clear your cache. Give it a “Butt Dyno” test and see if you can notice anything. After your personal test try using http://tools.pingdom.com to see how much time you shaved off.

Post your blog url and what your average loadtimes are. If you are feeling frogy provide us with your hosting company as well. I am curious to see how everyone does with this and what kind of improvements you can make to your own sites load time. Good luck and happy blogging.