Nope, not an ad for increasing your sexual performance. I think we all get enough of those. My spam filters just can’t keep up with it. No, this is about website caching and performance techniques.
I have long noticed that the ol’ family website is a bit slow to load but really didn’t have any tools to figure out why. Compressing the template would probably have helped but really, how much? Would it be worth it? (Some might argue that any improvement is generally worth it but I’m one of those believers in doing the big items first, the rest can follow).
Came across a CMS component (I use Joomla on the site so everything is database driven, query oriented) that offered page caching. Installation was pretty easy and so far, the component is well-behaved. So check out joomlaperformance and grab the component for your situation. If you don’t use Joomla, well, then this tool won’t help you but you can read about the technology and get a sense of what you can do.
Page caching is simply storing a local copy of the webpage on the server and serving that up every time it gets accessed. The page would update every time something is “old”. (The definition of old is configurable and currently set to 10 minutes but on this site 24 hours might be enough - we don’t change it often enough really to warrant every 10 minutes).
A friend of mine talked to us about the college she attended, Claremont McKenna. I was expecting a typical recital of, “It was a good college… ” but instead she spoke how it was a transformational experience. Ostensibly my wife and I were looking into feeder colleges for child #2, who wants to go into medicine, but came away with a thought that this might be a much better choice for child #1. Since we were heading down to LA anyway, we decided to swing by and take a look.
So we listened to the admissions counselor and took the tour. The place sounds perfect for #1 kid. They want writers, philosophers, thinkers. And it’s a small, intimate atmosphere which makes it just about perfect for #1. I came away with the strong feeling that they teach the student, not the subject, and expect that the student will participate in this learning actively. They only have about 1200 students on the campus, so admission to the school is probably pretty competitive, given that probably 4,000 apply every year.
But man! I do agree that this would be a perfect school for #1 daughter. Right up her alley. So naturally, being the kind, supportive parents we are, we came back and talked it up. I think we will have to visit the place again, but I hope this is a match for her.
When I read that Gallery2 (Gallery2.3 rc-2 is just out) was going to support Piclens, well I just rushed right out and tried to upgrade the system. While that was bit of a pain with the current host - who is having PHP issues and still really has not worked them out - I did finally get the system upgraded. You can check out the pages in Piclens (photo wall if you like) by clicking on the slideshow option in any album.
Next, I have to figure out how to get all the albums in one feed. One thing at a time, of course.
The Coblentz Photo Gallery can be found here.
Nah, it’s not a onomatopoeic. Maybe it should be. It is a cool website tracking tool. You can head on over to Woopra and check it out for yourself. An alternative (I’m not prepared to say better) to Google Analytics. But I like the tool. I think it will be useful. It has a plugin for WordPress and another for Joomla, but you can just modify the header in your HTML and just get started.
I must have missed something in the instructions, because I installed it (but didn’t activate it). After you install the WordPress plug-in, navigate over to Settings –> Woopra Settings and put in the website tracking id and API key. It works better after you do that.
Same with Joomla: go to the site mambot page, edit the Woopra setting with the Website id and then remember to publish the bot. You’ll be analyzing in a flash.
Check it out.
