WordPress. Jetpack bloated, slow.

This blog was acting sluggish. My webhost said something was eating up compute cycles because of large numbers of database hits. I deactivated plugins one by one and looked at the results after a couple of days but there was no difference. I installed a CDN via the excellent W3TC cache plugin and while [...]

Geeking out with WordPress, CDNs, and Amazon CloudFront

It is truly amazing how powerful and sophisticated WordPress is becoming. Even better, much of this functionality is available from free plugins and themes. (The developers of such products can make money by doing support, custom work, etc., after giving away the main product and building a user base.)

Here’s an example, using the disk [...]

Contextly. Relevant links for WordPress

Contextly takes a new approach to having relevant links at the bottom of a blog post. Rather than attempting to find links based on the title of the post and the content, it lets you choose them. You can have internal links from the blog and external links as well. The interface is easy [...]

WordPress Plugins are getting sophisticated and powerful

In the past few months I’ve really ramped up using WordPress plugins, and they do some amazing things. All but two are free.

AddToAny is the widget at the end of each post which lets you share it on dozens of sites. I use it myself to to post to Twitter, Facebook, and Stumbleupon.

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Speed up WordPress with W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is an amazing, free WordPress plugin that when configured optimally results in WordPress blogs loading much faster, like this one.

If you want to view the home page in WordPress, it normally runs a PHP script, opens the database, populates the page with the data, then presents it to the viewer. [...]

Polizeros caching software change

Warning: The post is deeply geeky.

Polizeros is now running W3 Total Cache. You may notice the site is loading faster. (There were a few hiccups earlier in the day while installing it but those have been resolved.)

Caching software makes copies of frequently used pages, like the Home Page, then serves them up [...]

New smartphone interface for Polizeros

If you view Polizeros on a smartphone, you’ll now get a very fast loading, intuitive interface, via the WPtouch Pro plugin. Let me know how it looks in your smartphone.

Digging Into WordPress. An essential book

If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, you need Digging Into WordPress. It’s 400+ pages filled with useful info for bloggers and developers. I’ll be using what I’m learning here to set up CMS sites for clients as well as customize this blog. It’s really put the final pieces of the WordPress puzzle together [...]

Dear WordPress

In many ways you are wonderful, but you really need to think about how you release new versions of WordPress. We’ve had, what, two emergency versions in as many weeks, due to security vulnerabilities. But that’s just part of it. WordPress 2.8 was released June 10, 2009. We are now up to 2.8.4 So, that [...]

WordPress refused to submit to China censorship

In 2006 the government of China suddenly blocked WordPress.com from their country, thus cutting off 25% of their traffic. WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg soon learned China would unblock the blogs if WordPress would block specific words and phrases, as well as giving info on users to the government.

Mullenweg refused. Too many CEOs of other [...]