Category: WordPress

WordPress is my favorite Content Management System (CMS). Once in a while it helps me make some extra money. Once in a while it helps me look at the problem from a different perspective. But even when it doesn’t, I still enjoy using it for this (and a few other) websites. And I enjoy interacting with the community. I use this category to share bits and pieces which are WordPress related.

Site speedups

I’ve been getting a lot of complains lately that my blog is very slow. I experienced it myself too, but I couldn’t recall which changes caused it. I checked all logs and configurations and everything looked just fine.

I asked Vladimir Ivaschenko to help me track down the problem. He is known as The Master of strace, so I was pretty sure that he would be help me. And I was right.

Within minutes, we found out that problems were caused by del.icio.us Smart Tagging plugin that I have installed not so long ago. With plugin activated, wget would take anywhere from 15 to 90 seconds to load the front page of the site. Deactivating the plugin, makes wget finish in less than 3 seconds. I consider the difference to be big enough for the functionality that this plugin brings in, so I disabled it. Maybe I will use it later again, when things get faster.

Thanks a lot Vladimir!

Upgraded to WordPress 1.5.1

As recently promised I’ve upgraded to WordPress version 1.5.1. The process went very smooth and fast – something that I was missing with Nucleus. Most of the things work. Actually, the only bit broken is the BAStats plugin, which visitors don’t see and which is a beta anyway. So I don’t have any hard feelings.

The site seems slightly faster and more responsive indeed. There are still issues with my MySQL and Apache optimization, but I’ll get to it one day too.

If you see any glitches after the upgrade, please let me know via comments.

WordPress 1.5.1 is out!

There is an announcement of WordPress 1.5.1 at WordPress Development blog. In short, there were over 170 bug fixes, 1 important security fix, and several speed improvements. Changelog is available in two formats: short version and long version.

I myself haven’t seen any WordPress bugs (or I can’t remember any), but I sure could use some speed-ups and query optimizations. This site is getting more and more popular and I can see the load on the database already. Hopefully it’ll get cut a bit with the new version. I’ll be upgrading shortly.

More WordPress goodies

I came across this excellent resource with a bunch of WordPress plugins. It doesn’t display very well in my Firefox, with titles being written in green over the green background, but if you can get over that, it has a lot to offer. For example, I’ve immediately downloaded and installed two plugins:

  • BAStats. It provides a nice way to see site statistics in a Dashboard tab. Browsers, referrers, hosts, requests, search strings and all the usual bits can be displayed over a selected period of time.
  • Comment Quicktags. This one provides buttons that help in editing comments. Making text bold or italic, linking to URLs, striking through words and blockquoting paragraphs can’t be any easier now.

And there are a few others that I am looking at and thinking if I need them or not and if I should try them on or or not.

Fighting spam in comments

I’ve been getting some spam in the comments recently. I must say that since the upgrade to WordPress the amount of spam I am getting has drastically decreased, but it hasn’t disappeared. Fighting spam in comments and trackbacks, it turns out, is yet another area where WordPress rules.

WordPress has some built-in mechanisms for combatting spam, as well as a number of external tools, hacks, and plugins.

For the time being, I have enabled premoderation for comments matching certain words. I have also checked all options except for ‘An administrator must approve the comment (regardless of any matches below)’, which I don’t want to do at the moment.

Let me know if new settings cause any problems.

Update: This is a quick update to let everyone know that changes helped a lot. I am getting all those comments which used to show up in my “Waiting for approval” queue. I mark them as spam and off they go. WooHoo! :)