Just launched the new theme for my blog. Its pretty standard and has a minimalistic design. Coincidentally it looks like the WordPress 3.0 admin area. Though the site was in dire need of a new design, the real reason I started this little project was to improve site speed. After moving to my new MediaTemple (dv) server, I noticed that this site was using up a lot of bandwidth (My old hosting didnt even gauge my bandwidth…).

After looking at my site’s final output source code, I concluded…

1. My site has way to many plugins. I had many 3rd party sources which really delayed the site from being fully loaded
2. The current theme was using a lot of useless JavaScript
3. Some images used in the blog were not being stored locally
4. High file size (for the web) JavaScript and CSS files
5. Twitter Plugin wasn’t caching the data properly

Once I figured this all out, the best solution was really to delete all unused plugins and removed plugins that relied heavily outside the site. I also minified my CSS and used very small images for the layout. Overall I would say the main source of the loading time being over 6 seconds using the old theme was primarily due to all the external calling because sometimes the load would be really long on retrieving the script or image.

Anyhow the new theme is up, I’ m ready to see if some of the keywords I’m targeting will get a higher rank due to increase site performance!

Old vs New

Before you install WordPress, you’ll definitely want to see all the options on the table. You can either go on http://wordpress.com/ and sign up a blog for free over there or you can download the latest version and install it on a server/webhosting. Since this is a tutorial in how-to, you’ll definitely want to download WordPress and have your own blog on your own domain.

Requirements

• PHP 4.3 or greater
• MySQL 4.1.2 or greater
• Mod Rewrite enabled on a LAMP/WAMP Server
• FTP enabled server (prompt host/username/password)
• MySQL database (prompt host/database name/username/password)
• Dedication to update!

After confirming the requirements, go ahead and download the latest version of WordPress at http://wordpress.org.

Once you downloaded the zip/tar onto your desktop, go ahead and extract all the files to the desktop.

This next part you will need an FTP client (http://filezilla-project.org/).

1. Open the FTP Client
2. On the top bar (quick connect), fill out the host, username, and password
3. Go to the directory you want wordpress (for mine its the HTTP root NOT the main root)
4. On your desktop open the wordpress folder and select all the files then drag it into the server windows on the FileZilla (or your own FTP client). The reason you don’t drag the WordPress folder itself because then the url would be http://yourdomain.com/wordpress instead of http://yourdomain.com
5. Once all the files have been uploaded, close everything out, open your browser and go to the URL you uploaded wordpress to.

If you have your database information ready, go ahead and click create configuration. Fill out all the database information in its respected spots.

Once you submitted the information and the database has been confirmed, copy down the password it generates (I just copy paste it because you can change it right after). After that click login.

Username: admin
Password: (CTRL + V) if you copied the text.

Once you login, on the top a yellow bar with red text prompts you to change your password. Click yes then change the password (scroll down) to whatever you want.

Micro-blogging is now one of the most popular things to do on the phone, personal computer, and now on Xbox gaming console. With only a 140 characters to type, its plenty of room to type an “update status” but not enough to type an essay, which means this makes twitter an easy read. But is that all twitter can really do? Why is Twitter so important if it’s only about updating a person’s status? Facebook has videos, photos, applications, and the status feature…why Twitter?

As Twitter is becoming a custom to society, so is there API. TweetDeck, Tweetie, and DestroyTwitter are all applications and make “tweeting” a more pleasurable experience. Quickly go on a phone and send out a tweet or hop on the laptop to send out a quick status update on DestoryTwitter, without going directly to twitter.com. This is all so popular because of the convenience of twitter. Sure Facebook has an iPhone application, a mobile version of their website, and an extensive API but the interface just has so many options. Any person going on any of these extensions, will be spending about a minute looking at stuff and writing a status update. Twitter is simple, type, press post and it’s there. Read a tweet here and there; catch up on the people following… Twitter is not ever going to bring down Facebook because that website is mainly to connect a whole lives to the world verses Twitter is to connect real-time situations to the world. The nature of Twitter is “NOW”, the nature of Facebook is “What’s Up?”

The popularity of Twitter is so great, more and more developers are clinging to their API to connect it with their own business. A company might purposely leak some of their new product info so they use Twitter to fulfill that motive. An airline company might want to attract first time customers by offering extremely low “instant” tickets to help bridge a long term relationship with the customer. These are ideas that people are using on Twitter. For me though, I’m taking Twitter for a ride like no other.

Over the past 3 months, I have been conjuring ideas in how a massively used system can be used to communicate with other aspects of the Internet, like websites, video games, and news. Thinking to myself, all these are easily accessible at the comfort at my own home, why would I go through the trouble of doing such a thing? The answer is simply mobility. We’re in the world of “NOW”, impatient and thirsty of knowledge in the shortest amount of time. That’s how America is today. Kids all have mobile phones to communicate instead of calling from their home, a 15 minute delay on an airplane causes a mass crowd of “sighing”, and computers tend to be unnecessarily reset if it takes longer than 25 seconds to watch a YouTube video. These setbacks in life are not major, but they do become annoying when we should be in a life of demand with all this technology around us. It’s time to really take advantage of mobility applications and take it to it’s full extent. I plan on making several projects linking the aspect of mobility, to all corners of the web (without Safari).

Using Apache’s Cron Job and the concept of garbage collecting, I can create a website that obtains data and returns a result based on that data. For example using a browserless phone, I want to find out the weather tomorrow morning without going on weather.com because I’m on the train; I type in –FindWeather Tomorrow, within a minute I can receive a reply in how the weather will be the next day. Just enough time in between to check my tweets, text messages, and mail on my phone. Another concept is seeing who’s online in Facebook without going on Facebook. Like I stated before, going on Facebook directly will usually direct your full attention to there even if there’s nobody online. If I don’t want to waste my time loading for Facebook, I can just tweet my way in there to see who is online so if no one is online I won’t have to go onto Facebook. The situation there might seem trivial but its reality to most. If we can check up things without going through a “process”, the hassle of touching/clicking, or the interuption of “friend media”, gathering information from different corners all at the same time can be optimized. This is why I’m trying out this idea, to use Twitter to gather info all in a “any-format” display. These are just some of the ideas I’ll be testing in the upcoming months. I’ll keep a widget on my blog to show the progress of my new ideas.

A large portion of people who want websites for their business, home recreation, or for their soccer team don’t want to consume time putting up a website because they have lives of their own. So they download WordPress, Joolma, Drupal, or Oxite and upload it to their server and bing bang boom instant website (a common relation to ramen noodles). Its fast, its easy, and requires no effort (or knowledge) whats so ever. But is that the true way to start a website?

It depends.
Initiative and purpose are the two main factors for initial website development.

I have a blog with simple to complex features but I need a content posting system that is only meant to be viewed for paid customers that have paid for previous products from my e-commerce site. WordPress vs Custom Site.

My ecommerse site needs to be linked with my credit card processing company but I also need information from my private server to be pulled to the clients. Magento vs Custom Site.

I need a customize management site but I also need my site to have capabilities of processing surveys and quizes. Drupal vs Custom Site.

Sometimes people take the easy and painless route because its the best option that fits their needs but others take the “bottom up” route so all the credentials are met properly. When first starting a website, don’t immediately think “okay I need to make this file, and find that file…” when the resource is already out there for you to use. But also don’t beat around the bush and trying to make a half ass job by finding “plugins” that require to do a very specific job like pulling info off a private server every 10 minutes.

Of course most of these open source systems, ready-out-of-the-box applications are very versatile to people’s needs, sometimes it’s easier creating a custom site because there’s no learning curve (like Drupal has) and the sky is the limit.

Part 2 will be the process in starting up a custom made website .

Image rollover is a very common design method on websites but many people use different methods in how they code their image rollover. The following method will show the best way to utilize the image rollover effect.

This will be a CSS class designated for a specified <a> tag.

.image1 {
 background-image: url("path/to/image/normal.gif");
 height: 100px;
 width: 100px;
 display: block;
}
.image1:hover {
 background-image: url("path/to/image/hover.gif");
 height: 100px;
 width: 100px;
 display: block;
}

After writing up the CSS, create the code in the HTML side

<a class="image1" href="#">Test</a>

The following will result in a 100 x 100 pixel rollover image link that can be used over and over, cross-browser.

Now the main issue with this is the loading aspect of the rollover image. When you declare it in the css, it not executed until the proper conditions are met (mouse hover). Meaning the hover.gif will not load until the user positions the mouse over the designated link. This will result in a quick blink in the image because its still loading when you put your mouse over it. To fix this you need to preload in javascript.

var test = new Image();
test.src = 'path/to/image/roll.gif';

Every rollover image is loaded along with the page and the “blink load” is no longer there. A clean transition from image to image on hover is established.

If your site is all custom coding, try making a PHP class that does all this for you. Create a public function that has the parameters of normal and rollover (and any other feature you want to add). Have it output the individual CSS class per image, a preload variable in the javascript, and the actual <a> tags within the html. A total of 3 output functions, 1 input functions, and unlimited processing functions in the class. This will save you a lot of time in coding and it will produce valid w3c coding. This will also eliminate the use of built-in methods that are in programs such as Adobe Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage.

• RT @jQueryHowto: jQuery core uses Google closure to pack & minimize its code. For other alternatives http://bit.ly/WwkNm 16 hours ago
• execs' ** i know but people following me dont know that I'm too lazy to fix a typo, but as extra procaution, gonna do it anyways 16 hours ago
• eating out with exec's tomorrow, wtf do i wear? business casual? 16 hours ago
• @AshleyFabs r u like the BC spokeswoman? lol 17 hours ago
• @kriskiler all shared hosting sucks :\ 17 hours ago

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