Performance Hacks
The following performance hacks are now implemented to improve the involution experience for the kids. Most of these were suggested to me by YSlow and Matt Mullenweg at Wordcamp.
- Installed wp-cache
- Enabled mod_deflate for gzip compressed html, javascript, and css
- Disabled ETags
- Added Expires headers
- Moved CSS to the top of the <head> container
- Removed the AJAX calendar wordpress plugin (this was hammering the database)
The front page now renders in about 1.5 seconds instead of the 4 seconds that it used to take. The next step is to remove all of the little mini icons in the sidebar and replace them with sprites which will reduce the number of HTTP requests from 21 down to 10. Running JSMin on my Javascript probably wouldn’t hurt either.
UPDATE: Apparently, you should only disable ETags if you’re running a server farm. Doing so for a single server installation probably does more harm than good.
Livecalendar Pages, Year, and IE7 Problems
Involution.com has been running on Wordpress for about a year-and-a-half now. One thing that I particularly like is the calendar index to all of my posts that’s actually provided by the Livecalendar plugin. This plugin seems to have been developed by different people at different times, and it mostly works, but had some issues in Internet Explorer for ages. Namely, the “loading” animated gif would display forever in Internet Explorer. Some clever punter (not the original author or maintainer as far as I can tell) actually managed to fix that snafu, and released a new version of the plugin called “1.9rc3″. Problem is there were still a couple of issues with it. Namely, the previous year button seemed to only work once, and if you published a page (not a post) on a given day, it was creating a post link for that day in the calendar. Posts and pages are different to Wordpress. So, the page thing was easy enough to fix as I just tacked on “AND post_type=’post’” into all of the Livecalendar queries. The previous year problem actually lived on Line 266 in livecalendar.js where previous year wasn’t being computer correctly. So, I give to the web community what I’m calling livecalendar-1.9rc4-hoyhoy. All of the fixes rolled in so you can now enjoy flawless calendar indexing goodness on your Wordpress site. Happy blogging.
Involution Wordpress Theme v1.4
I just updated my Involution Wordpress theme to version 1.4 with a couple of stylesheet hacks. You can download it from my theme clearinghouse, http://themes.involution.com.
