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Optimizing your WordPress installation for cloud computing

Osman S Borutecene — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 15:13:16 +0000

When you are on a shared server, you don’t need to pay attention to how much server resources your WordPress installation utilizes. Your hosting company pays attention to that and notifies you when some code go berserk and ends up eating too much cpu or something like that. However, on a cloud computing environment like media temple’s grid server, you have to be careful with how your WordPress installation uses server resources. Your hosting company won’t notify you until the resource consumption goes abnormally high. That’s not bad, so you don’t want to be notified everytime you use more cpu than normal because we are in the year 2008 and we may need server resources for many of the applications we use.

On the other hand, when time passes and your blog starts to get extraordinary attention, you may want to learn tips and tricks on how to optimize your wordpress installation and how to minimize resources it uses. Here are tips and tricks about just that.

First and foremost, you must use caching. WP-Super Cache is the best option for that. WP Super Cache caches your posts and pages as beautiful pure html files so your server doesn’t use resources for php output. Other caching plugins don’t do that (at least I don’t know of any other). Others usually just caches the content and continues to use php cycles to deliver output.

The second important thing you have to keep in mind is that WordPress’ custom 404 (page not found thingie) handler uses too much cpu cycles. This isn’t unique to WordPress. Any other CMS like Drupal, TextPattern, etc. who uses custom 404 handling also uses more cpu cycles than any normal, usual 404 page. What to do about that? Use Google Site Maps plugin in order to inform Google faster when you have deleted a post. This plugin automatically generates a Google compliant site map and submits that to Google everytime you make a change in your content. Apart from that, there are also urls that are seeked by robots and they also can generate 404 error codes when not found. One example in my mind now is the favicon.ico file. Favicons are used by many web sites for bookmarking urls. You have to place one in your root directory because every robot I know looks at your root directory for that file. Moreover, not only robots look for favicon.ico but also many browsers look for it when users want to bookmark your blog. Many modern browsers also look for it because they display it in the tab. The best practice is, go create one and place it in your root folder. Favicon.cc is my favorite place for creating favicons and downloading them into my computer and then put them on my host. It’s very practical and free.

Same holds true for your feeds. Use Feedburner for distributing your feeds. Since your feeds will be distributed by feedburner and not by your server, you will have this load minimized too. Your domain.com/feed will be checked (almost) only by Feedburner and this is at most once or twice a day.

There may be other examples for would be 404 files that don’t come with your WordPress installation. You can make up your own examples too. Either way, you have to find a way to create them or handle them. So far, I don’t know of any plugin which handles that issue. Maybe it’s a good idea to build one. It should check for common known urls on your blog which may be requested often by robots, search engines, and like, and maybe creates them for you.

Third, comment spam also puts another weight on your WordPress installation and that eats your valuable CPU cycles too. Akismet is NOT a solution for this because a comment or a trackback or a pingback will hit your server and be recorded for evaluation anyway. WP Spam Free solves this problem by not allowing comments from agents which are not a browser. Since many bots who works for dropping spam comments and trackbacks to WordPress blogs do not recognize and use JavaScript, this plugin checks whether comment owner’s agent can recognize javascript. It’s a wise solution. It also informs normal users who turned javascript off so that they don’t get surprised when they are not able to post comments.

Those three factors are what I have experienced so far with my grid server. I think this can be the first post in a series because as time goes by I would experience new cpu cycle hungry factors and find solutions about them. So I’ll post them too. One thing I am not sure about is wp-cron.php and admin-ajax.php files. It looks weird but it seems like they eat more cpu cycles when you don’t post frequently. But this is just a guess. I’ll post about that too when I am sure of them. So, please subscribe to my RSS feed if you find this post useful, there are more to come.

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How to transfer a single post or selected posts from one blog to another?

Osman S Borutecene — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 11:54:13 +0000

A couple of days ago, I had to transfer a post from one of my blogs to wordpress.com for mirroring purposes. This may be something you will rarely need but it happens. I had a post which became very popular and at the time I transferred the post there was 900 plus comments in that post. Handling huge amount of comments in WordPress is another issue, I’ll try to mention that later in this post but now I will move on to ‘how i did it’ section.

I created another user in my WordPress installation. That’s very easy, you just go to users on the right of the WordPress admin menu and add a new user, of course with a different name than yours. You can also set its password and other details there but that part is irrelevant with what we are going to do. Then go to post(s) you want to export exclusively and edit them by changing their author. You can do that in the post editing page below the editor.

Then go to ‘manage’ and select export. There, you will have the option of restricting posts you will export to a certain author. Select your newly created author for exporting his posts. Then click ‘download export file’ and you are done. You have an export file where your selected posts are included. Now you can use that file for importing them on any other WordPress blog provided that they have the proper version of WordPress, I mean supporting this export – import thing.

For more practical options, when you need a temporary place to export & import your posts, just use WordPress.com. Go to WordPress.com and create a new blog for just that. Don’t forget to set privacy options there so you don’t have duplicate content in case search engine robots hit your carrier blog at the time. It may be also proper to close the blog for normal visitors too, according to what you do with that blog.

Using a WordPress.com blog is especially a necessity when you transfer posts from Blogger (blogspot) to WordPress because self hosted WordPress still lacks that functionality. The option is there but it doesn’t work (taking about 2.6.2 at the time of this writing).

Well, it’s that easy. Now let’s discuss the scalability of WordPress when it comes to hundreds of comments. In my case, WordPress was not able to handle them for me. Both the amount of comments (900 plus) and the traffic was heavy on that single page. There wasn’t any issue with the server. The traffic and the server load this page created was equal to any page that would receive the same amount of traffic and attention. Pagination of comments is a solution but it didn’t work for me because I find existing plugins immature. The only solution to this in the future might be that WordPress have built-in, nature pagination feature for comments, like in Drupal. Most probably that was why Dooce made the switch to Drupal from WordPress. She opens her posts to discussion rarely (only every four or five posts) and she receives thousands of comments under those posts.

If your receive less than 100 comments on your posts than WordPress is scalable for your in termes of comment load handling. But if your receive hundreds of comments on each of your post than WordPress may not be the best option for you. Of course there are ways for handling this however a naked WordPress installation is just not sufficient to handle 1000 comments effectively.

Let’s go back to our transfer business. That’s how I did it. I mirrored the post with all the comments to a WordPress.com blog and everybody looks happy now. Don’t forget to close comments and pings while you start exporting those posts because it is very possible to receive comments after you have started the export process and those comments will get lost.

Another tip: I copied everything for that post. The text, the url and the exact date and time. Then I have recreated the same post with the same url with the same date and time. Then I closed the post for comments and only opened them for pings. I also stated in a single comment that discussion is now going on in another address, in a mirror. Now, things are fine. Everybody is happy, including me.

One last thing that I have learned from this experience: It is a wise thing to close comments after a period of time you have published a post. I think one month is convenient. Otherwise, the post’s comments turn into a forum instead of a discussion of what you have written.

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Wordpress’ default theme and template are a complete mess

Osman S Borutecene — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 23:00:53 +0000

I am very upset about this sad realization. For the last couple of days, I was working on the design & development of a new blog. I will not name it now, it is still full of test posts and therefore it would be really meaningless to link to it right now. Anyway, I had a couple of options. To look for a nice wp-theme and fiddle it, to play with the default or classic themes and create a new look and functionality out of them or, finally, write one from scratch. The last option is the wisest option however it has been nearly 1 year that I haven’t been interested in any piece of wordpress code. So, I was also not familiar with versions newer than 2.0.x. Therefore I first opted for the second solution and started tweaking the default theme.

The default wordpress theme is a great failure. It is of course very famous because it is the default wordpress theme. First off all, it is not standards compliant. Especially the order and usage of CSS selectors are catastrophic. I will only name one for now. There is this header part, then there is this blog name section which correctly marked as h1. But then there is this description section marked as a div. This is the most common failure among amateur “web masters” who are just introduced to web standards. The description section should have been coded as a p class=”description” or p id=”description”. There is no need for a div. This is a big error but this is maybe the smallest semantic error in the whole wordpress default theme.

The CSS file is exactly a turmoil. There are many classes identified more than once and that makes it very confusing to work with them. The use of ems are a complete failure. So much that when you change an h2’s em value, it shows up in different sizes gradually. No, of course I am talking about the same class of h2! It is in the commentlist section. Go see it for yourself. Change the em value there, for instance change the em of h2 from 1.2em into 1.6em, it ends up showing growing sizes as comments continue.

And no, I am not using Internet Explorer. I am testing everything on Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 7, Konqueror (Safari), Internet Explorer 6, respectively. I can’t waste my time to tell all the errors in this default themes CSS file. I want to go into some other catastrophe that the web suffers because of those default and classic wordpress themes.

Many advanced wordpress themes are built by tweaking the default one or the classic one. And that’s a good thing, because once they put those two templates into wordpress core and ship them together, there is no reason as not to be sure about they are the right thing to go from. However, unless you strip all the CSS at once and start writing CSS from scratch by using selectors and classes from the template source, it is impossible to produce a coherent design. It’s awful. Look at the CSS file of the theme “White as Milk”. The author clearly state it in the CSS file as a comment:

THE FOLLOWING CODE IS DERIVED FROM THE DEFAULT “KUBRICK” THEME.

THE STRUCTURE AND LAYOUT IS IN MY OPINION, NOT THE WAY CSS SHOULD

BE ORGANIZED, BUT FOR NOW I AM LEAVING IT THE WAY IT IS TO KEEP

IT CONSISTENT.

As a matter of fact, since almost all themes are derived from the classic or default layouts, it is almost impossible to change and tweak them for the majority. It’s not sufficient to know CSS, you have to master it to a degree where you can find some other people’s errors in it and fix them.

The classic template is not as faulty as the default template but it is also very deceiving. For instance, it doesn’t have a real footer where stands below all the content and sidebar. Instead, the footer stands just under the content. It is not compatible with the widget functionality of a standard wordpress installation. Even not with the latest version shipped!

Briefly, this is a shame. Many wordpress users just think that they don’t know enough CSS. They are wrong. CSS is in fact quite easy but it depends on good mark-up on the template side, and clearly written CSS files. The beauty of CSS and web standards is in their usability, easiness, practicality.

I don’t think that those faulty history of the default and classic templates of wordpress is going to end here. They couldn’t fix it for years right now. It looks like they are even not aware of what is wrong. The turmoil still continues with K2.

I had to heavily tweak the default template files on a very detailed level. This was meaningless. This can be a whole lot better.

I hope somebody pays attention to work on a such important issue.

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How to choose a hosting service for your blog and why?

Osman S Borutecene — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:39:46 +0000

Recently, I moved a couple of my blogs from wordpress to blogspot. The main reason for this was my hosting service. It has been nearly one month that I started using blogspot often as a blog service. Now is the time to make some comparison as well as suggestions on how to choose a host for your blog.

Well, let’s look at what you want to do with your blog. If you trust your creativity and believe that people will enjoy reading whatever you write, there are two options in my mind. You should whether choose wordpress.com or blogger.com. Here is why: both services are very easy to maintain. If you want to monetize your blog, blogspot is the way to go because it is very easy to implement adsense on your blogger blog whereas this is not difficult but impossible on wordpress.com. Wordpress.com doesn’t allow publishing ads on your blog.

If you say that you are not creative up to par, you will need tools and facilities that will make it easier for people to visit your blog and read more and then come again. And this is usability. Usability in navigation, usability in content creation etc. In this case, I recommend you a self hosted wordpress blog. For a self hosted wordpress blog, I can suggest you liquidweb.

Blogger is better than a self hosted wordpress blog based on some criteria. If you are good in coding, then I would suggest you to use Blogger because they are also very scriptable. However, with the introduction of new Blogger layout system, you have to be en experienced coder because you need to know how to “escape” some of the characters between two blocks of Blogger layout tags. This is difficult for a beginner and very prone to syntax errors. Wordpress is not the same. On any self hosted wordpress, you have thousands of different documentation in your hand and even if you are a beginner you can mess with code as much as you want without harming your blog too much.

And this is needed for any blogger because there is always the need for customization. You may want to display ads only on certain posts in certain categories on your blog or you may want some archive pages to look different than ordinary pages in your design. Then a self hosted wordpress is the way to go.

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Creating original content

Osman S Borutecene — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 13:27:16 +0000

Are you concentrated enough to create original content for your blog or website? Creating original content is difficult, not because people aren’t creative enough but because people are bombarded with a standard perception. Many talented people set up a blog and then go research “big blogs” and look for what they do. This usually leads to procrastination and prolongs the process of a new, creative blog. People look at famous blogs and say “yes, I should look similar to them”.

This is far from being original. This may sound naive to you but you are already original because each individual on this planet is unique enough to create unique, original content. However, there is this conformity surrounding us only to prevent us from creating the original content that in fact we can create easily.

Most people get stuck with blogging just because they are too busy with visual design, web standards, what other people are posting, etc. If you want to create original content and stay away from the crowd (which is a good thing because it’s a professional way and success is a higher probability) then you should pay less attention to what the blogosphere is mostly concentrated on.

If you take the time to have a different look, a different perspective on many famous blogs, you can see that they did not fall into the trap of conformity. Most of the time, they are very bold and audacious. Of course many corporate blogs do not fall into this category. I am talking about individual work. If you look at the blogs of weblogs inc, you cannot see this original content and approach because there is the anxiety of saving investments and this makes them far from being original and conform to norms that they have in mind.

Individual blogging is not bound with such norms. Take PostSecret as an example. It is a very original blog. Yet it doesn’t look like professional to many people because they are accustomed to see blogs like engadget and this is what they find and count as professional. So, originality doesn’t depend on professionalism. PostSecret is very famous, it gets many hits, many unique visitors. Because it is an original peace of work.

Moreover, PostSecret is on Blogspot, which is a fact many people with a naive realism would argue that this is not a professional look.

Well, if you want to create original content and think that you should have a blog similar to many famous blogs out there, think again.

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Even The Shortest Essay Is Not A Blog Post

Osman S Borutecene — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 02:54:59 +0000

I have been thinking on a project that involves some minor information design. I suddenly caught up by the idea of what is a post and what is an article. This reminded me of a blog post of Dave Shea.

I think a blog is news source regardless of what is it about. It may inform you about that the blogger saw this movie and has slept with that person, etc. It’s a news source that can tell you that the blogger person has written a new article, but its not the article itself.

Therefore, Wordpress has the static pages feature. So that the user will be able to both blogs about this and that and then also writes articles, or essays in whatever kind of nature.

Just a couple of cents in a break.

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Creating Purposeful Home and Landing Pages

Osman S Borutecene — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 16:28:24 +0000

I recently added something to my home page. The addition is a little information on what this web site is about.

I have done that because I noticed the fact that even blogs have to identify their home pages. When users land on to any post or page from search engines like Google, there is a purpose there. The visitor reads the page, gets the information she needs and that’s it. However, if she clicks for the home page, than there must be some additional information where she is and what this place is all about. Briefly, of course.

Do this for your own good. The less confused visitors you have, the more user-friendly you will become (Master Yoda, 2007). Becoming more user-friendly is beneficial for your sites search engine optimization, results in more people bookmarking your site and increase overall quality of experience of your website or blog.

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WordPress Features Shadowed by Blog Usage

Osman S Borutecene — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 15:45:29 +0000

WordPress is beautiful and functional content management system. However, due to its excessive popularity among bloggers, it is mostly seen as a blogging-only tool.

WordPress has native features for a static home page in it. For instance, a WordPress installation first looks for home.php which can be used as a front page. It only loads index.php if there is no home.php specified. Let me tell you what that means in plain english: You don’t have to be stuck with themes and templates that are prepared primarily blogging in mind. WordPress has a feature so called pages, that are apart from the blogging cycle. By using home.php, header.php, footer.php, sidebar.php (alongside with sidebar widgets or not) and several pages.php, you can easily use WordPress for your static web site content, for instance for your corporate web site or brochure-ware.

I won’t go into detail right now because there are tons of documentation on the web about how to prepare a home.php, how to prepare page templates for WordPress.

Why should I use WordPress if I am going to have just a static web site?

Because you will still benefit from hundreds of plugins developed for bloggers. Then you will also benefit from a great documentation. Furthermore, you will take the advantage of WordPress’ builtin editor, management panel, etc.

Why don’t you put together a tutorial for what you tell here?

It’s just a matter of time. I’ll try to provide one soon.

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Annoying Technorati Search Results

Osman S Borutecene — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 22:14:23 +0000

I like visiting Technorati and look for what is hot. However, especially in the last couple of weeks, some bloggers abuse Technorati search results by both tagging their every single post with the most searched 15 topics in Technorati and using these as keywords in their posts. That makes it really difficult if something you really need to search is on Technorati’s popular searches list.

I am sure that the Technorati team is working on that and I hope they come up with a solution soon. A feature such as being able to vote for search results would be interesting and help build a cleaner better Technorati search.

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Got Blog?

Osman S Borutecene — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 10:09:48 +0000

So you want to have a blog. Start with choosing a topic and a blogging platform. If you intend to post on a personal blog, then it’s not of great importance of the topic and the publishing platform because personal blogs usually do not create massive amounts of traffic. But anyway, for such a personal nonprofit blog I suggest you WordPress.com which is a free blog hosting platform by the people of WordPress and Automattic and its free. Moreover, it has great features and it’s real fun. However, if you aim to start a blog in a certain topic, or a blog for earning money with adsense then there are points that you should take into consideration.

If I were you, I would prefer blogspot. Blogspot allows you to tweak the theme you use and you can also add scripts which enables certain features as some free statistics, adsense code, etc. Blogspot has a nice, good tutorial on its features.

If you have enough budget to host your own installation of a blogging or cms software, then I suggest you to consider using WordPress, seriously. WordPress is most probably the best publishing platform, especially for personal publishing on the net. By an enough budget, I mean something around $20 would do it.

If you intend to engage in problogging, you should choose a main topic and try to be consistent and coherent on that topic. If you want to earn money through your blog then that means you have to serve something to the public and in return you will either earn from advertising on your blog or commissioning from affiliate programs. So, in order to maintain a reasonable amount of traffic, you should pay attention to what you give your visitors as your content. This isn’t hard to achieve (not the traffic I mean, the content). Put your visitors’ shoes on and try to look for something on your blog. If you are at least moderately pleased with the results then you are on the right way.

There are plenty of success stories and how-to like articles on the net so make sure you check a couple of them.

By the way, what not to do is also crucially important. Don’t trust automated problogging software. This is a digital world and you will get caught as fast as the speed of the internet and you’ll surely lose credibility.

What I tell you here is just a mini start. Dive into your favorite search engine and you will find plenty of meaningful reading about blogging.

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