I finally upgraded my Wordpress installation to 2.7.1, and while I was at it I decided to change the theme to something that makes reading code snippets a little bit easier. The previous theme I was using limited each code block to about 450px in width, plus it felt a little bit too dark. Now, running this Coogee theme, I’ve got a total of 660px worth of content width.
I’m also trying out the WP Super Cache plugin to speed things up. I don’t get very much traffic here, but Wordpress takes much longer to load than I’m accustomed to, so I thought I’d try the cache route. It makes a huge difference. My main blog index was taking over 3 seconds to fully load, as timed by Firefox’s YSlow plugin. With the cache enabled, it’ll load in about 0.3 seconds. Ahh.
Hopefully all my old posts and comments are displaying properly. There’s some odd character encoding issues that I need to sort out, but if you notice any glaring problems, like broken links or errors, please let me know.
In the past I’ve upgraded Wordpress the old school way: download latest.tar.gz, unzipped to a temp dir, backed up the database, backed up my docroot, copied the new files into place, ran the upgrade script, and made sure all was right with the world. Not terribly difficult to do, but very much a hassle that I very much preferred to avoid.
But then this morning I decided to glance a bit further down the Upgrading WordPress page and saw this little gem:
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svn, wordpress
I decided to move my blog from the old address (http://www.cholmon.com) to one that is named after me, Drew C King, in order to get a bit more organized. I’ve been using “cholmon” as a pseudonym across the internet for many years, but it’s not exactly the easiest name to remember…or to spell correctly. My goals in doing this are not only to have a domain name that is easier to spell, but also to stake a more real-life claim over the content I’m posting, and to make that content more SEO friendly so that interested people can find it as quickly as possible.
I’m also getting much more interested in search engine optimization in general. Coming from a background based primarily in development and system administration, this area is pretty new to me. While it seems to be mostly common sense, there are a plethora of subtleties – hence the O in SEO – whose importance would be pretty difficult to guage without the help of highly experienced SEO folks like Matt Cutts over at Google.
So in addition to using this blog as a means of getting my PHP-related ideas and experiences down on virtual paper, I’m also going to use it as a way of trying out some optimization techniques to see first hand what works and what doesn’t.