Archive for the ‘Wordpress’ Category.
I am very fond of the WP Lightbox plugin I have on my blog. I’ve always wanted it to automatically scale images that were too large for the page. that way, I could happily upload full resolution images without worrying that my viewers would only get to see a tiny corner of the full image. I’ve found some new Lightbox-like plugins that do what I’m looking for, Shutter Reloaded and Lightbox JS. I want to like Lightbox 2.5 but it doesn’t have the auto-scaling and it takes forever (read: almost 2 seconds) for each image to finally appear on the screen given all it’s fancy window slides. :-(
What I want in a lightbox plugin:
- Opens image box smoothly (a quick fade would be nice
- Auto-scaling if the image is larger than the screen
- Very light footprint on my WordPress code… IE, don’t add code to each image tag in the database. Can be uninstalled seamlessly
- Multi-image gallery possible but not required
- When showing gallery images, the “next” and “previous” buttons don’t move when you hit the first or last image (IE, when the icons change from “[close] [next]” to “[previous] [close] [next]”
While FastCGI has been running, calls to WordPress have gone from about 4 seconds to 2 seconds. Calls to Mediawiki have gone from 8 seconds to 5 seconds. :-)
I installed PHP_FastCGI on the blog and the (private) Flaming Lotus Girls wiki. I had tried installing it a year ago but it proved unstable. New instructions were put on the Dreamhost wiki and it’s been running well for the last few days. Here’s how I installed it:
in my root WordPress folder, I created a file called php5-wrapper.fcgi. In it, I wrote:
#!/bin/sh
export PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=2
exec /usr/local/dh/cgi-system/php5.cgi
and then set the file to be executable like so
chmod u+x php5-wrapper.fcgi
Then I added the following to the .htaccess file:
AddHandler fastcgi-script fcg fcgi fpl
AddHandler php5-fastcgi .php
Action php5-fastcgi /php5-wrapper.fcgi
Done!
Now 3 PHP sessions stays active, waiting for people to call on my server instead of PHP starting up every time I get a hit. When I run ‘ps aux’, I see the processes just sitting there, waiting. Sometimes there’s up to 6 processes temporarily.
My blog was getting slow so I called Dreamhost support. They wrote back
Okay, I see a pretty big issue. It looks like you’ve got 92MB of overhead (i.e. unoptimized queries) on your blog’s database. Optimizing the queries seems to have knocked your DB down to a more sensible 37.8MB – which can be trimmed further if you go thru and purge any questionable comments in Spam Karma as its tables take up 7.6MB. Go ahead and see how the optimizations have helped and let me know if you happen to have any further questions. I’ll be more than happy to help you get things sorted out if you need me to.
Thanks!
Jason
That helped muchly. I put on my calendar next to flipping my mattress, “Repair blog database tables to remove overhead. Then Optimize tables. Enjoy.”
I used to have Search Everything installed but it broke in some version of WordPress. Well, it’s back. Now, when you search on my blog it looks at all of the comments as well as posts. You can also search for phrases with “quotation marks”. :-)
FLV-Embed lets me put Flash videos on WordPress with great ease.
Find it on the FLV-Embed homepage.
Here’s some tidbits from the homepage
Continue reading ‘Upgraded to FLV-Embed 0.3.2’ »
To improve the performance of WordPress, I simply removed all of the unactivated plugin files files from my plugins folder. It’s hard to tell exactly how much this improveds things, but page load times are definitely a little quicker.
I had several WordPress plugins that weren’t activated but were in the plugins folder. Here’s the list: wp-db-backup.php, backuprestore.php, pagenavi.php, wpPaginate-v2.php, suggest.php, subscribe2.php, search-meter.php, popularity-contest.php, af-extended-live-archive.php, words_in_post.php, hello.php, wysiwordpress.php, textile1.php, markdown.php, enhanced-post-list.php, did_you_pass_math_functions.php, did_you_pass_math.php, challenge.php
Phew, I play a lot with WordPress plugins :-)
I’m sure you noticed that there’s now some ads on my site. I’ve been playing with them since May 15th or so. Here’s where I’ve come to…
I put one ad at the bottom of each article page in (what I hope is) a relatively unobtrusive spot with unobtrusive colors. Very popular pages that I don’t care too much about (like this) get a few more ads sprinkled in them.
Google Adsense says that my blog site gets about 500 ad impressions per day. WordPress stats agrees with that but Analog stats says I’m getting more like 2,000 page views/day in my blog folders… hmm. Maybe it’s that Analog is counting spam bots and web crawlers. On the ads, Google says I have a clickthrough rate of about 0.5%. The site makes $0.50/day…. about $180/year. So the site pays for itself and buys me a nice dinner every few months. You might be able to extrapolate your potential earnings from these numbers.
I suppose it’s worth it.
WP-Cache and Spam Karma had an incompatibility. It made it so that when you post a comment to my blog, there was a delay of an hour before you see the comment. Spam Karma 2.3 RC1 fixed that problem.
Hurray
I can now inundate you with sounds and videos from my vast repertoire thanks to the FLV Embed plugin. I found that WP-FLV had trouble when you’d try to edit an existing post with an flv in it. It would lose the tag due to an incompatibility between the flv tag and the graphical input method in WordPress 2.1.
To make an entry, I just write something like this:
(open square bracket)flv:http://lee.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/swarm.flv 360 270]