Three Wise Men

Optimizing Wordpress – Tips for Speed

Image via Wikipedia

Wordpress is crap, but it is the best crap we can get. When your website, with Wordpress sitting in the back, starts to pick up traffic, it will slow down and become unresponsive. Adding hardware will help, but correctly implemented load balancing and load distribution across more than one computer can be tricky and expensive. Trying to optimize Wordpress and the web server itself usually gives better short-term results. In the long run even this won’t help and it will just postpone the inevitable, you will have to cluster in one way or another. I am not going to talk about clustering and load balancing today, I will focus on optimizing your Wordpress. Newbie friendly, yet hardcore, meaning that I will provide explanation for all the complicated stuff.
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Wordpress plugins you need to survive

This is a list of Wordpress plugins that we use and more or less can’t live without. In alphabetical order:

• After The Deadline – Spelling, style and grammatic checks. It helps some, after all we’re not the native English speakers.
• Akismet – Spam control, this is the second defense line in case the first one fails.
• All In One SEO Pack – Yes, we are optimizing our pages so that Google and the likes have less trouble finding us.
• Bad Behavior – First defense line for spam. Bad Behavior is here to relieve the stress from Akismet. A clever idea of fighting spam even before you start scanning it for banned words and phrases. It does its job by checking HTTP_AGENT and few other protocol specific things. It will be good until spammers learn how to fake this.
• Google Analyticator – Adding Google code snippets to your theme so that you can use Google Analytics can be a drag. This plugin will do this and more instead of you. The Google Analytics dashboard widget is bloody excellent!
• Google XML Sitemaps – Generates sitemap list for Google, Yahoo, Ask.com and many others. Again one of the SEO things …
• Gurken Subscribe To Comments – For people who wish to track the feedback on their comments. Disabled by default, unlike some other sites.
• Our ToDo List – Which usually contains items named: ‘Review this’.
• Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu – Because it is just pretty! Useful too!
• Sociable – The ability to share. Sociable supports many, many, many different places where people can submit your posts for others to see.
• Visual Code Editor – Free the code, share it! And if you do it then make sure it is properly entered. Visual Code Editor takes care of writing the code in visual Wordpress editor.
• WP-Footnotes¹
• WP-Syntax – Remember the part about sharing the code? If you do it also make sure it is properly syntax highlighted. This plugin will do that for you with the help of the Geshi.
• WP Super Cache – Not that we have so many hits, but we like to be ready.
• Zemanta – At last but certainly not least, this little gadget. Zemanta will scan your post and extract relevant links, keywords and find relevant images for you. Then you can add them to your post with few simple clicks. Then you can brag around about semantic web and Web 3.0.

1. Because sometimes you just need them. [↩]

Zemanta features – TWM!

Guys at Zemanta, that did such a great job with Wordpress plugin, which makes writing blogs easier than eating pancakes, featured Three Wise Men in their blog!

Thanks for the plugin and keep up the good work! Thanks for the feature too. ;)

Zemanta plugin and Wordpress 2.7

Wordpress 2.7 is currently in Beta3 stage and we can soon expect a final 2.7 release. This release is pretty much feature packed, Web TwoZero-fied and it looks really smooth. Writing blogs is even simpler and faster.

However, writing good content with a lot of references, links and added images can be a pain, no matter what you do. Here’s where Zemanta comes in play. They provide you with a plugin that will automagically extract various keywords from your text and get back to you with all sorts of references to those keywords. With a simple click you can add multiple links to your post. Read on!

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