A Special Set of Social Media Icons

As part of an experiment for Tim Krause‘s E-commerce and Online Marketing class, Amy Vitale has released a beautiful monochrome set of social media icons that are available for download on her site.

The collection was inspired by doodles that Amy would draw on notebooks or scratch paper.  The set would look great on any minimalist or monochrome style site or blog.

To download the set, click on the image, or visit here.

The only thing Amy asks is that you use the icons for personal use.  I ask that you credit the designer as well

Optimizing Your WordPress Site Pt. 2

This is the second part of my optimization series for WordPress sites which focuses on what administrators can do in order to speed up load times for the sites they manage. Part 2 focuses exclusively on some of the coding changes I’ve made to a few sites I manage in order to speed up WordPress. Part 1 of the series can be found here.

Code Modifications

One of the great things with nearly any web content management system is its use of themes and templates. In order to make themes and templates simple and easy to use without having to change much of the code, PHP functions are used excessively so that the admin doesn’t have to do much coding (in most cases, no coding at all) in order for the template to work with the system it was designed for. With WordPress for example, simple things such as the site’s title and css file locations are dynamically called using PHP. If you plan on keeping your theme for awhile, or have designed a theme exclusive to your site, much of the dynamic PHP calls that can slow down load times can be eliminated entirely, especially with information from a theme’s header.php file.

For all of the code snippets, Planet Label has allowed me to used code snippets from their blog to use for my examples. Below are snippets of the original code and the changes I made so that less dynamic calls are made to the server.

Site Title

Original Code:

That seems like a massive amount of code for just the title of a page. Not that I also added additional formatting to make the code appear clearer and easier to read. While code like this may be necessary for dynamically rendering a site name on the fly for any site that installs it, does your site really need it now that it’s installed and that the theme will likely be used for an extended period of time or rotated seasonally? Let’s give the title a little more of a static flair instead.

Static Code

Short, simple, to the point, and one less dynamic request made to the server.

Pingback URL

Original Code

As you can see, the link for the pingback URL is also called dynamically in themes. Not sure what a pingback is? Check out the the WordPress Codex.

Static Code

RSS and Atom Feeds

Original Code

So much work for the server when it can be handled like this…

Static Code

Language Attributes

Original Code

Static Code

Content-Type Attributes

Original Code

Static Code

JavaScript

Original Code

Static Code

Stylesheets

Original Code

Static Code

You’ll notice in some of the examples that making the code static causes more code than the original code snippets. Length of code is essentially something we’re not looking into for the results, but rather the fact that less calls to the server are being made. The less the server has to work, the faster your WordPress site can deliver content to your audience. Furthermore, these changes should be made if you intend on keeping your theme for a long time or rotating it with other themes throughout the year. Finally, if you are designing a theme to release for download, it is imperative that you keep the PHP server requests in the header.php file otherwise chances are good that the theme won’t work for the other person trying to use it. Let them do the tweaking and optimizing.

Are there any other code tweaks that you recommend for speeding up a WordPress site? Feel free to drop a comment with your thoughts, opinions and suggestions. The more the better! Happy coding.

Optimizing Your WordPress Site Pt. 1

WordPress, like many other web content management systems, rely heavily on the use of plugins, libraries, and dynamic server requests using PHP to serve content to its viewers, but with all of the calls to the server, and a massive amount of plugins running on the site, overhead for a simple page load can often times become tremendous. This post is the first part of a two (or maybe more) part series on procedures a person can take to decrease load times for their WordPress install. This post will focus specifically on the plugins I use to keep load times at a minimum for my site.

The Plugins

Plugins serve a wide range of purposes for any developer or designer, whether it is dispatching a tweet whenever content is published, or shifting/restructuring content on a page. While plugins are wonderful and can solve many problems and provide additional functionality, it’s ideal to stick with only plugins that are needed. For example, if you are testing multiple media player plugins for audio files, keep the one media player plugin that you intend on using and delete the rest. If there is a plugin that you intend on using, but haven’t applied it to your site yet, keep the plugin disabled until you use it, otherwise extraneous requests may be made to the server where unnecessary.

On the other side of the spectrum, there are some really neat plugins that can really assist in speeding up load times for WordPress.  Some plugins re-arrange code or optimize the database.  Here are some of the plugins I use for my site:

• Clean Options – This plugin is great for cleaning up orphaned or unused options and settings that may have been left in the MySQL database.  Use this plugin ONLY if you are proficient with WordPress and MySQL.  I ended up wiping out some options from plugins that I have not used and uninstalled.  PodPress, though, left two empty tables in my database, so I had to go into PHPMyAdmin through my host to delete them manually. I knew they were PodPress related because they contained podpress in the name.  I noticed that this plugin did produce a large amount of false positives for possible orphans, but before deletion, the plugin takes you to a page highlighting the values that are slated for removal.
• WP-Optimize – For a more robust alternative for Clean Options, this plugin also manages deletion for page/post revisions and comment spam/unapprove clean up.  Thanks for JortK for letting me know about this one! Check out JortK’s post about WP-Optimize here.
• JavaScript to Footer – A neat and simple little plugin that moves Javascript to the footer.  Here’s a wonderful article from Yahoo about development practices that goes more in depth about why JavaScript should be moved to the bottom or footer of the page.
• Revision Delete! – I love this plugin because of it’s ease of use and effectiveness.  When people are constantly editing or revising content, that can build up a lot of excess gunk in the database that manages WordPress content.  Pretty soon the database is fill with hundreds of page/post revisions which may cause poor site performance.  This plugin will automatically drop revisions older than the x amount of days an admin sets it to. I have mine set to 2 days, for example.  Less junk and more performance!
• WP Super Cache – This plugin is ideal for anyone wanting to add a little speed boost to their page because it renders a cached backup of a page as static HTML that is served to viewers of the site.  The plugin is relatively easy to set up and the required .htaccess mods can be written automatically from within the plugin’s settings. There are a multitude of options in regards to what an admin wants to be cached and how often garbage collection and cache deletion is run on the site. This plugin is by far one of my favorites!

Are there any plugins that you use that deserve to be on this list or an upcoming list for speeding up WordPress? Any alternatives that you recommend for the above mentioned plugins? Your input and insights are important to me, so please feel free to leave some comments expressing your experiences with optimizing WordPress using plugins.

Tomorrow’s post will focus on optimizing the header.php file that’s typically included in WordPress themes to increase performance.

WordPress Update Advice

Hello everyone!

For all of you that have noticed, there’s a new (and important) update available for WordPress. Version 2.9 features can be found here.  I write this post for people who have had troubles upgrading their WordPress in the past or recently using the automatic service provided. A typical problem with automatic upgrades looks something like…

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 34554432 bytes exhausted (tried to
allocate 2355240 bytes) in directory_path/public_html/wp-includes/http.php
on line 1331

Scary issue, am I right? I certainly was a bit terrified and immediately thought that I would have to upgrade the CMS manually.  This made me shudder on the inside and I began to panic.  One source told me to try to find the default values for the memory limit and adjust it to either 16 MB or 24 MB.  I thought that this was a wonderful idea, but none of the methods of approach worked for me.  In fact, I caused Error 505′s to pop up a few times.  A part of me panicked again, and was fearing that I wouldn’t be able to keep my site up to date.

I had realized that the problem paralleled with the resource issue I have had recently with FireFox.  My install of FireFox has been running very sluggish and draining many resources lately and I realized it had come from the abundant number of addons I had installed and enabled for my browser.  I decided to give the idea a shot with WordPress, EXCEPT that rather uninstalling the plugins, I disable them. Lo and behold, this post has been written from WordPress 2.9

EDIT: Not only does this upgrade pertain to version 2.9 of WordPress, but any version of WordPress.

If anyone is having any troubles with their upgrade or are having a similar problem and didn’t find the above methods clear, feel free to leave a comment.  Also, if anyone has any alternatives to the problem, feel free to let me know and I will update this post accordingly, with name and site cited as a source.

How to Set Up Office Word 2007 to Publish WordPress Posts

In this tutorial, I will show you how simple it is to set up Microsoft Office Word 2007 for posting WordPress posts to your blog.  It’s a really nice feature for those who spend a lot of time writing their blogs in Word and then pasting them into WordPress, or for those whose posts are text dominant.  There is a limited amount of functionality compared to the regular WordPress interface, but it’s still worth considering.

First, you’ll want to open a new document in Microsoft Word.  Following that, click on the Office Button, click on Publish, then click on Blog.

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