real blogging tips

In an effort to help everyone streamline their blog’s operation I have decided that today I would share some of the secrets to a high performance blog which I have happened upon in the last couple of months. This for those without a dedicated setup can make the surfing experience a much more pleasurable one. Also it can save you from suspension from your hosting provider for sucking all the cpu time or even in some cases from going over your predetermined bandwidth amounts.

This article will cover blogs on the wordpress flavoring as really their is no comparision to it at all. If you are not currently running on the wordpress platform I invite you to start today by visiting wordpress.com

One thing blogs are for sure is cpu hungry monsters. This can be attributed to the fact that the blog itself is running on the php engine. This with a few visitors will not slow down your server at all, but if you happen to luck into the top 10 on reddit, digg, or even stumbleupon you may see your account in suspension when 500+ people are trying to active hit your landing page. To get your blog tuned up and ready for such things we need to take a look at how your blog could be wasting memory and even cpu cycles.

The memory aspect is pretty easy if you havent opted for a more high end host you may actually have a limit and like I had said before most of the time when your first starting out this isnt a problem but when you start to move forward with success or even manage a front page on a major social network you are going to have to be prepared. I highly recommend starting this hunt out by lookin at your plugins and asess if you absolutely need them all. Some people have been known to run 20-30 plugins or more. While on better hosting this generally wouldnt be an issue for those not able to be at that level I recommend that you use as few as possible. This itself can speed up your hosting depending on the type of plan you have. For the most part hosts no longer impose memory restrictions.

The cpu aspect can be a game breaker as most high end hosts will give you unlimited bandwidth and just about a terabyte of hard drive space. The catch is that they really do not allow you to suck the majority of the computing power in the shared hosting computer. For me this is not really a big issue as it appears I am on shared hosting and the machine is a 8 core or cpu setup. I have yet to see this jump above 10% even under the heaviest of loads from me. This is great, but their is a limit. If I were to make a front page or even slashdot for something this could change in a matter of seconds. You want to be able to control this as much as possible and the best way is to use a plugin for wordpress called super cache. Essentially it will convert your dynamic pages into static html pages. The first thing I thought when I heard this is that I would lose the dynamic functionality of my site, after all it is a blog and the content is very dynamic. This is not even speaking about ad rotations etc. One thing I learned shortly after is that only the code is cached, not your images, or javascript. While OIO Publisher is a php script I was worried it would be cought permanently in whatever state that the snapshot was taken. Alas this is not the case I am currently runnin super cache with proper ad rotation thanks to the ad server java script which is included with OIO. So My site still is live to comments as it refreshes the cache on comment. The rest of the time the initial landing page is a cache instead of raping the hosts cpu we are merely spitting out predefined and variably updated content. This makes sense for anyone lookin to speed up their wordpress blog. Once I starting using it I have to say their is no way I wouldnt now. Remember from an earlier post where I was telling you that you have 5-10 seconds to get your first time viewer into an article and loaded up. This is a deal breaker if you can not. Super cache will put you one step ahead of the competition.

Another method to helping out your blogs performance and one thing I am completely guilty of doing only until recently is making sure that the images within your site are NOT saved at the highest possible setting. While they do look perfectly pretty, they are entirely to large, even in todays majority of broadband you need to consider peak loads and that it is possible that your readers especially those internationally speak may not have that 10mbit down speed like you do. Instead of saving images at 100% quality try using 70-80% you will not be able to see a difference most of the time in the end quality BUT you will notice that the image file sizes will shrink roughly 50%. This is huge when your talking about a graphically intense site such as many blogs are these days.

Another thing to take a look at is what kind of javascripts you are loading often times people use filters to avoid seeing these anyway such as adsense blockers >.> Try to run just one analytics program as well as loading 2-3 can and will slow your site load times down by upto 3-4 seconds. Entrecard and sitehoppin usually do not effect your load times tremendously, if you are on very simple hosting you may consider putting these on their own landing pages to help increase your main pages loading time. If you are like I was you just cut upto 10 seconds off your inital page load times and that computes into less lost visitors to the load time gremlins.

For today this is all I will cover I plan to cover some advance methods for enhancing your blogs performance later this month.