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.
Well, for those of you following the trials and travails of the website overall, you will be relieved to know that it is finally back online. I don’t know quite what I did to it (well, actually, I know roughly what I did but no one seems to know why it broke) but I’ll tell you this: backup, backup, backup.
I foolishly installed an admin patch (what was I thinking!?!) without backing up the other files overall. Supposedly the patch fixes a timeout issue with the content management system we use, so I just dropped the files in, and voila! I was locked out of the system and kept getting invalid sessions. I have no idea what finally fixed it - I tried backing out the fix, I tried reinstalling the entire set of files, I even upgraded the entire CMS. None of that worked.
I kept looking in the forums for help, came across a few ideas, and while I’m not sure what did the trick, the last thing I tried was resetting the security permissions. That seemed to do it, so now I’m putting the permissions back the way they were. Ugh.
Anyway, the site was completely offline for a while. What was both maddening and reassuring was that the photo gallery and the blogs were all still working; even though they are partially controlled by the CMS. I really am glad it’s back online and I will go and invest in some backup utilities.
If you visited and could not move around the site, sorry about that. I think we’re back now and the interesting part is that we have upgraded most of the site - as a result of my trying just about everything.
Well, they say that upgrading Word Press is easy. I guess it is but I had to do it manually because the version was so old the automatic upgrade processes would not work. Well, that seems to have taken care of the reverse order problem too.
Reading the instructions is not always my strong suit; but in this case it’s much more than just a cooking recipe. You really have to follow the directions very carefully. When I cooking, I just make things up. Doesn’t really work that way here on the admin side of things.
Well, it worked first time, anyway. And I got the link to the other blog working as well. Nice.
Well, sorry folks. My hosting provider upgraded the database system and there is a bug in the database that makes all the blogs show up in reverse chronological order. So you’ll have to scroll down to the bottom until they upgrade it. I wish I could work around it, but I can’t.
Ah, this just made me laugh out loud…
The teacher gave her fifth grade class an assignment: get their parents to tell them a story with a moral at the end of it.
The next day the kids came back and one by one began to tell their stories.
Kathy said, ‘My father’s a farmer and we have a lot of egg-laying hens. One time we were taking our eggs to market in a basket on the front seat of the pickup,when we hit a bump in the road and all the eggs went flying and broke and made a mess.’
‘And what’s the moral of the story?’, asked the teacher.
‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket!’
‘Very good,’ said the teacher. ‘Now, Lucy?’
‘Our family are farmers too. But we raise chickens for the meat market. We had a dozen eggs one time, but when they hatched we only got ten live chicks. And the moral to this story is, don’t count your chickens until they’re hatched.’
‘That was a fine story, Lucy. Johnny, do you have a story to share?’
‘Yes, ma’am, my daddy told me this story about my Uncle Bob.
Uncle Bob was a pilot in Vietnam and his plane got hit. He had to bail out over enemy territory and all he had was a bottle of whiskey, a machine gun and a machete.
He drank the whiskey on the way down so it wouldn’t break and then he landed right in the middle of 100 enemy troops. He killed seventy of them with the machine gun until he ran out of bullets, then he killed twenty more with the machete till the blade broke and then he killed the last ten with his bare hands.’
‘Good heavens,’ said the horrified teacher, ‘ What kind of moral did your daddy tell you from that horrible story?
‘Don’t f*** with Uncle Bob when he’s been drinking.’
I attended the Web 2.0 conference last week. Well, I only went to one day’s worth. I found a few interesting things on Thursday, which were oriented at Ontologies and metadata and the like. I wish I had been there for this keynote on Wednesday by Clay Shirky about “Cognitive Surplus”; I suspect that he’s right.
Well, not Simon and Garfunkle, that’s for sure. Today the site was down. I use Joomla to manage the content and somewhere along the line the whole thing just hiccuped. Fortunately the Joomla crowd had the answer on the forum. One of the top dogs answered my post for help, suggested that the site problem only looked like a) but was really b) and lead me to the answer. Sweet.
I had to mess with the site configuration files but hopefully it won’t happen again, Mom, I swear!
Yeah, like I really know what I’m doing or why it happened. Just one of those things, man. S*#@ Happens.
