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

]]> http://www.mattloinfo.com/websites/optimizing-wordpress-site-loading/feed/ 0 http://www.mattloinfo.com/coding/codeigniter-multiple-views/ http://www.mattloinfo.com/coding/codeigniter-multiple-views/#comments Mon, 03 May 2010 22:26:00 +0000 admin http://www.mattloinfo.com/?p=321 If you want a main header and footer file (like WordPress) with variables passed from the controller then continue reading. The content below simply displays this exact layout.

The controller file holds an array with array so on the first view file, the second array can still be passed, thus keeping organization between the header, the main page, and the footer.

Some Controller File

<?php
// Create a 2 dimensional to pass variables.
class page extends Controller {
	function index() {
		$data['header']['title'] = 'Title Tag';
		$this->_loader("home", $data); // Home is the main view page
	}
}
?>

The $header and $footer variables are based on the array that was passed initially. Remember the array keys get converted to the actual variable name when its passed onto the viewer.

Main View Page

<?php $this->load->view("header", $header); ?>
 
MAIN CONTENT
 
<?php $this->load->view("footer"); ?>

Header File

....
<title><?php echo $title; ?></title>
....

Pay attention to $data['header']['title'] and see how the data travels through both views.

MVC Example

C.I. uses a programming model called an MVC (Model-View-Controller). The model provides the data in which the controller processes it and the view displays the data processed by the controller. This model helps keep applications organized, OOP oriented, and separates the developer from the programmer. Though the initial deployment does not have a template engine enabled, it does offer a template parser class through its extensive library.

The framework’s library is what really makes CodeIgniter a real winner. Several classes help start up your application such as a sql/odbc query class, pagination class, session class (handled via cookies), benchmarking class, XML-RPC class and several others that really help launch bottom up applications. With an extensive up to date user guide, it definitely makes learning all the libraries a breeze. If there’s anything too complicated, C.I.’s forums become a really great resource to receive help and collaborate with others. Think of CodeIgniter as the WordPress for Custom PHP applications, its not hard setting up and and its easy to get started; you’re not bound to many rules (unlike other PHP frameworks). There’s a ton of 3rd party plugins and libraries that bring CodeIgniter into the future of rapid web based application development. With its great debugging tools, auto-loading libraries, and online community support, its definitely worth testing future applications on this fantastic framework.

http://codeigniter.com/

http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/ <– Excellent documentation

I just recently started using CodeIgniter for a recently iPhone Web App (http://bowl.mattlo.info) for testing purposes and now going to start using it for my clients. The only thing I’m getting used to is when I’m using AJAX to send info via URI, I have to use a permalink-style link because CodeIgniter does not allow you to use $_GET in PHP. Though you can disable that rule, I’d rather just get used to the permalink structure of passing data. I will write a more extensive C.I. article once I really master the framework. This is an extremely brief overview of CodeIgniter and I strongly encourage you try out the framework yourself!

if($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] == "/index.php") {
	header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
	header("location: http://YOUR-DOMAIN-NAME.COM/"); 
}

Very easy alternative if you don’t have .htaccess (like on Windows Servers).

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.

2) User Interactivity – Display a user online script or even develop an online chatting program based on IP availability. With Session Handling, you could have people interact with each other by classifying IPs and logged in users that match those IP Addresses. Majority of online games are based using IPs. Though Session Handling could also provide user interactivity alone..

3) Ban Hammer – The three most effective way of banning someone off your website is Email, Username, and IP Address. Email and username are only available if users have the option to register their name. IP Addresses can be recorded without the user knowing. The only backdraw to this is if you ban an IP thats networking 10 computers, all 10 computers will be banned. That is the only downside when using IP as a ban hammer (though used commonly across the web).

4) Exceptions – Want to make a private viewing site specific towards a network? IP Exception (along with Cookies) are excellent. Give people cookies, record their IP Address, show them a sneak peak of what you’re working on. Great for showing a specific client how much work has been completed (if your a web developer) or if your just showing a small crowd of people a video and not want to program a login script.

Download Twitter Follower PHP Script

Note: This is just a quick version of the script, not really tested in secure environments or anything. Expect the script to break if you don’t type in a real screen name, watch your API call limits, or if you don’t have a valid authentication login.

Instructions

1. Download, Extract, Upload to Web Server
2. Edit get.php (username and password)
3. http://path.to/script
4. Type in a valid screen name and you’re good to go

There are limitations to this such as the Twitter API calling limit. You can only follow so many people before the script breaks unless your IP or account is whitelisted. You might think..well okay the API call limit per hour is 150, that means I can search 150 screen names in 1 hour, that’s not bad at all. WRONG. The program can only grab 100 followers per call, so say I wanted to grab an account with 1000 followers, it will take 10 API calls to grab all 1000 followers. If you wanted to grab 10 accounts with 1000 followers…well you can do the math. 15 Accounts per hour with that situation is inefficient. Getting an account whitelisted can help ya overcome that limit.

For a more professional version of this script with more features, contact me and I will give you a quote. It’s good having such a feature on your site, it’ll help you market your business or website better with millions of twitter accounts recorded on your database.

http://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/originals/sunny/

They completely dominated their site with Twitter. Is it a good thing? Of course it is! Think about it, user feed back increases which means more people are going back to their site for videos, pictures, and exclusive content. Because Twitter is real-time they took the advantage of the example of a real-time stock ticker and transformed it into a real-time Twitter ticker. One of many ways to make Twitter unique.

To the point…Twitter is a business companion and also an advantage for web developers. Knowing how to utilize the Twitter API and also knowing the business advantages of using Twitter for marketing purposes is a enormous plus for your resume and a great way to attract clients (for you web freelancers out there). But remember, if your going into marketing, you need to know all the aspects of social media to really be “hip” in today’s trends. Customers want to relate to something, don’t be Twitter only because there’s a large statistic somewhere stating X amount of people have no idea what the hell Twitter is. Just take advantage of Twitter in most of its many corners.

Future

Everyone that’s computer savvy knows about Twitter now so what does that mean 5, 10, or 15 years down the road. Will there be a company that will buy out Twitter or will Twitter be the centralization of all real-time social data? My blog (http://mattloinfo.com/) already is using Twitter to bridge real-time contacting to my phone. CNN is using the Twitter to communicate with its viewers and at the same time informing the public. Iran recently used Twitter to voice their opinion in a dictatorship nation. So what’s the future of Twitter? In my perspective, its going to turn into what we saw happen with the .com and internet shopping. Stock up on ideas and names because down the road, everyone will know Twitter and it will be a custom to life. Facebook is already the best site to communicate between friends and family. Because Twitter is more public, it will lag in its popularity due to the factor of openness and lack of “pretty features.” Applications already tie Twitpick, Twitter, and other applications but it’s still easier using Facebook. So how will Twitter progress to the younger non tech savvy crowd? Time. Celebrities, news, weather, and friends will make Twitter be a foundation Web 3.0 and a reality for all communicative devices. So again, if you have ideas in how to use this flexible way of communicating, be curious and look into your ideas. One day some team will become millionaires because they invented a method of using Twitter with a non price related variable to attract customers in a positive way that can be dependable. It’s like the lotto for web developers. Gear up with your knowledge of PHP and start inventing already. Tell me your thoughts on Twitter @matt_lo.

P.S. the @ (at) sign is already mainstreaming into the web as a form of meaning (Twitter contact). When we see example@yahoo.com we know its an email, eventually @example would mean its a Twitter account.

Normally I would make a class and all but for display purposes I’m going to keep it simple. Remember, you need to have cURL and SimpleXML extension enabled in your php.ini

$rss_feed = "http://www.bungie.net/News/NewsRss.ashx"; // halo 3 news eh?
 
$ch = curl_init($rss_feed);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 4);
$data = curl_exec($ch); // put data from rss url into variable
curl_close($ch);

All thats happening on top is simply going to the URL provided and getting the rss feed source code (aka the info).

// handle the xml data parsing
$xml = new SimpleXmlElement($data, LIBXML_NOCDATA);
 
// Do some testing with the data using print_r();
// We gotta see what info we need
 
 
print_r($xml);
 
// it'll show all the data from the RSS feed but we
// only need the news so lets shrink our test
 
print_r($xml->channel);
 
// item is an array so we can put a loop to process it
// NOTE: channel and item are the variables used in the source feed
// Other RSS Feeds may not have all this, though it should be standard
foreach($xml->channel->item) {
 
$item->description; // will show each description for each item
// other options that can be included (by doing tests,
// you can find out what options are available)
// title, link, pubDate, guid, description
 
$item->link; // would give you the url to the news article
$item->title; // title of the article, obviously
 
// AGAIN: variables names may be different, use print_r($xml)
// to initially find out your variables
}

Thats it! The Step Process is as simple as 1, 2, and 3.
1) Get info via cURL
2) Parse info via SimpleXML
3) Select what you need by viewing the whole variable, and pick vars out

When the loop was occurring, you notice that I didn’t start the url using $xml. That’s because the [ITEM] tag was already converted into a SimpleXML format (all the variables were) so using $item->description is definitely valid. $xml->channel->item[0]->description will get the same result if you want to see a different perspective in whats going on.

If you want to play around with the data, instead of echoing the variables, just have other variables equal them for organization.

Full working source below

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<?php
$ch = curl_init('http://www.bungie.net/News/NewsRss.ashx');
 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 4);
 
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
 
$xml = new SimpleXmlElement($data, LIBXML_NOCDATA);
 
foreach($xml->channel->item as $item) {
	foreach($item as $key=>$details) {
		// XML is all the way down to
		// the core array, no need
		// to do $xml->... or 
		// $item->...
		// the loop did the work for us
		echo '<strong>'.ucwords($key).
		':</strong> '.$details.'<br />';
	}
	echo '<br /><br />';
}
?>

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.